The Way We Never Were

How nostalgia and perception clouds our understanding of who we are and how we came to be.


Lately I’ve had the occasion to reflect at great length on what I see in our society as a growing fondness for the way things used to be. It’s called nostalgia, and while it is not a new phenomenon, it has grown into a national obsession over the last few months.

Simply stated nostalgia is defined as a longing for the past, a sort of homesickness if you will that borders on romanticism. Those who suffer from its effects often have feelings of melancholy about change and often react morbidly when confronted with the fact that no matter how hard they try, they cannot return to the past. And even when they reflect fondly back upon it, their recollection of how things were is skewed by a distorted perception.

I have been a victim of nostalgia myself and quite recently. Earlier this month, for instance, my wife and I went on vacation to San Francisco for the occasion of our fifteenth wedding anniversary. We had gone there for our honeymoon and thought it would be nice to “relive” the experience. The city did not disappoint; it was magnificent, just as it was back in 1994. North Beach, China Town, Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park, the Muir Woods, Berkeley, the cable cars, and both the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges. It was breath taking. To say I was sad to leave would be an understatement. As it began to dawn on me Friday that we would be leaving the next day, I couldn’t help but wonder where the time had gone; and, as we sat on the grass of Washington Square Park, I was hoping that this moment my wife and I were experiencing would last forever. It was as though I wanted time to stop moving forward, just so we could always stay right where we were in our vacation. But time doesn’t stand still; it keeps on moving forward no matter how hard we resist. The problem with the present is that it all too quickly becomes the past, and all you are left with are memories. Like it or not, my wife and I boarded the plane for home the next day. Exit vacation stage left; enter reality.

Looking around the political landscape of the country these days, I see an awful lot of people who have been caught up in a nostalgic haze. For them it isn’t so much a longing for a longer lasting vacation, but rather for a return to a time when things were simpler and less chaotic. People left their doors unlocked, children walked to school without supervision, people stood on their own two feet, father knew best, and everyone left it to Beaver.

Compare and contrast those times with today and it is easy to understand how some might be caught up in an over zealous melancholy. Home invasion, children being abducted, welfare fraud, South Park and Family Guy. Yes, I suppose if those two extremes were presented to me, I might tend to agree that today’s world is no match for yesterday’s. The good old days are pretty tough to beat aren’t they?

Gladys Knight once said, “Come to think about it, as bad as we think they are these will become the good old days for our children.” Those words were the opening lines in a remake of the classic Barbra Streisand song “The Way We Were.” Knight sang that song in 1975, more than thirty years ago. Those children are now fully grown, many of them with children of their own. I was one of those children that grew up in the ‘70s, and while I have no children of my own, I have often thought about that time in my life. Was it really that much better? Or did it just feel that way? Knight goes on in the prologue of the song, “Why does it always seem that the past is better? We look back and we think the winters were warmer, the grass was greener, the skies were bluer, and smiles were brighter.” And then she begins to sing the first verse of the song:

Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time rewritten every line?
And if we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me
Would we?
Could we?

Deep down we know what the real answers are. The problem, however, is that reality is not what we’re looking for. It never is. Like me on that vacation last week, I wanted no part of reality. All I wanted was for my good time to keep going on. Returning home and going back to work was not something I was looking forward to, no matter how essential it was. My perception was not based on facts but fantasy. The fantasy was that we could stay in San Francisco forever on vacation without a care in the world; the facts were that we could never have afforded to stay there indefinitely and we both needed to return to work in order to pay for the vacation we had just enjoyed. To the rational mind, facts, no matter how inconvenient or unpopular, eventually win out over fantasy.

But since perception, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, it can often become twisted and distorted over the years. We conveniently forget the bad times we lived through, and choose only to remember the good ones. When thinking about history we forget about the McCarthyism and segregation of the ‘50s, the Vietnam War and the riots of the ‘60s, or the political scandals and runaway inflation of the ‘70s. No matter how many episodes we watch of Ozzie and Harriet, Gunsmoke or the Carol Burnett Show, nothing but our selective amnesia can hide the painful truth that most of what we believe and know of the past has been influenced not by real events, but by our distorted perceptions of them.

That the good old days weren’t that much better than the present is a truth we simply don’t want to hear, because it means facing up the realities of a complex, and sometimes upside down world. We may have wanted the world in which Robert Young and Jane Wyatt had it all together, everybody got along, and hardship never darkened their door, but deep down we were smart enough to know that life more closely resembled the world in which Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton headed up a dysfunctional family that argued constantly and was mired in the controversies of the day. The two worlds of Father Knows Best and All in the Family were about as stark a dichotomy as any imaginable. The former represents our fantasy; the latter our reality. They were separated by two decades, yet they may as well have been in different galaxies as far as anyone could tell. Fantasy often seems real until you wake up in the morning and find the light of the new day shining brightly upon your face.

Take good old-fashioned self-reliance for example. Sociologist Stephanie Coontz in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, wrote that “most Americans agree that prior to federal ‘interference’ in the 1930s, the self-reliant family was the standard social unit of our society. Dependencies used to be cared for within the ‘natural family economy,’ and even today the healthiest families ‘stand on their own two feet.’ The fact is, however, that depending on support beyond the family has been the rule rather than the exception in American history, despite recurring myths about individual achievement and family enterprise. It is true that public aid has become less local and more impersonal over the past two centuries … but Americans have been dependent on collective institutions beyond the family, including government, from the very beginning.”

Coontz goes on to expose yet another myth about self-reliance, this time with respect to the American West. “Prairie farmers and other pioneer families owed their existence to massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilizations that dispossessed hundreds of Native American societies and confiscated half of Mexico, and state-sponsored economic investment in the new lands. Even ‘volunteers’ expected federal pay: Much of the West’s historic ‘antigovernment’ sentiment originated in discontent when settlers did not get such pay or were refused government aid for unauthorized raids on Native American territory. It would be hard to find a Western family today or at any time in the past whose land rights, transportation options, economic existence, and even access to water were not dependent on federal funds.”

Between the $15 million it spent on the Louisiana Purchase and the $200 million it spent on building canals that linked the eastern seaboard with the new settlements in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, government intervention and funding were critical in the development of United States hegemony in the hemisphere. The rugged, go-it-alone approach, so widely held to by many of today’s conservatives, was nothing more than a myth started by individuals who felt slighted by the government and passed on by one generation to the next in perpetuity.

And it wasn’t just the establishment of an American empire that required a massive government undertaking. By the early twentieth century most of the wealth of the nation was held in the hands of a very few powerful men like J.P. Morgan, who owned U.S. Steel, the International Mercantile Marine and controlling interests in several banks as well as most of the railroads in the country. At one point Morgan and his partners controlled aggregate resources of more than $22 billion, equal to the value of all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi River. In December 1912, Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency committee. The committee ultimately found that a cabal of financial leaders were abusing their public trust to consolidate control over many industries. The findings of the committee inspired public support for ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, passage of the Federal Reserve Act that same year, and passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. Government intervention, far from being intrusive, was essential in the break up of the Trusts and in restoring the level playing field needed for a truly competitive market.

The establishment of National Parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite was yet another example of reality triumphing over myth; the myth being that government encroachment into the private sector is always disastrous. Without the protection of the federal government most of the parks that had been set aside would’ve been the victim of private development interests, their beauty lost to future generations forever.

Noted conservative and sometimes hypochondriac, Pat Buchanan, has been lamenting for some time now the loss of traditional American values and sounding the warning bells over the grave threat posed by illegal immigration.

“The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.”

Buchanan fails to see that every ethnic minority that immigrated to these shores brought with them experiences and values that were unique to this country and could not help but shape its culture. His myopia is no different than that of his predecessors who feared the Italians, the Germans, the Jews, the Irish, or the Poles. Irrational fear makes us see things that aren't really there and blinds us to the truth.

But of all the myths that have been perpetrated on the country, none have been more hideous than the idea of black poverty being tied inexorably to the disintegration of the black family. Stephanie Coontz again writes “The image of black family collapse feeds on racist stereotypes and media distortions, ignoring the diversity of African-American family life. Yet it also draws on some real, and very disturbing, trends affecting a section of black America. The most striking of these is a social and economic polarization in which poor African Americans have lost ground, both relatively and absolutely, for the past twenty years.

“Journalist Ken Auletta’s The Underclass (1982) first popularized the concept that black poverty is linked to a degraded inner-city subculture locked into self-defeating personal and familial behaviors. The argument became increasingly stark over the 1980s: Black poverty exists because black men are irresponsible, black women are immoral, and black children run wild. What African Americans need, according to what is often called ‘the new consensus,’ is not government programs but a good dose of sexual restraint, marital commitment, and parental discipline.

“No other minority got so few payoffs for sending its children to school, and no other immigrants ran into such a low job ceiling that college graduates had to become Pullman porters. No other minority was saddled with such unfavorable demographics during early migration, inherited such a deteriorating stock of housing, or was so completely excluded from industrial work during the main heyday of its expansion. And no other minority experienced the extreme ‘hypersegregation’ faced by blacks until the present. All these circumstances greatly affected African-American family life.”

Another hideous myth that is accepted as fact is “the so-called explosion of childbearing among single black women. Birth rates for black women have actually fallen by 13 percent since 1970, compared to an increase of 27 percent among unmarried white women.” Much of what we know of the African American experience in this country is based on false perceptions fed to us by a largely white media, which knows “next to nothing” about the true facts of black poverty.

In an excellent example of perception over reality consider that one of the more realistic television shows depicting a black family – at least for the first three seasons – was Good Times. It featured a conventional nuclear black family with a strong black man as the head of the household who often worked two jobs just to put food on the table and a mother who nurtured her three children and raised them to be respectful. Though poor and living barely above the poverty line, they nonetheless got by and remained intact. In every way imaginable, the show bucked the perception of racial stereotypes for black families, and by all rights should have been a hit. And yet its ratings, with the exception of season two, remained poor throughout its tenure on CBS.

By contrast, a decade later NBC launched The Cosby Show, depicting an upper middle-class black family featuring Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable and his wife, a practicing attorney, who, despite an obviously demanding schedule, manage to successfully raise their family. The show was a hit for the entire length of its run, tracking number one five seasons in a row. Many have concluded that the popularity of The Cosby Show when compared with the small appeal of Good Times was due to the fact that a larger percentage of Americans found it far more plausible to believe in a financially affluent black family that stays together than a struggling one that doesn’t fall apart. In other words, John Amos’ character of James Evans was unbelievable as a father who chose not to run out of his responsibility as a father, whereas Bill Cosby’s character of Dr. Huxtable fit right in with viewers’ expectations about a successful black father. Ironically, the producers of Good Times, in a contract dispute with Amos, decided to write him out of the series after the third season by having him die in a car accident.

So you see myths, while they have played a crucial role in our development, have also taken on a life of their own and, when carefully explored, do not hold up to the light of day. That they are still kept alive is proof that reality, despite being essential for our survival, is still way too inconvenient and sometimes just too painful to bare. But when we have the courage to wake up from our denial and embrace reality, far from consuming us, the freedom it provides, allows us to grow into the people God intended us to be.

No matter how much I may have resisted returning home from my wonderful vacation, when I woke up the next morning I was in my own bed in Long Island, New York. My melancholy would last a few days until I finally accepted my reality. I still have my nostalgic moments when I retreat into the past. Like the population, my old habits die hard. The "City By the Bay" still beckons, and no doubt Maria and I will return to it again one day. For now it remains where it has always been and must stay: 3,000 miles to the west.

It’s not a political circus, Mr. President!

President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

It has been eight months since you took the oath of office and became our nation’s 44th president. You entered the White House on the heals of a landslide victory that millions believed would lead to the formation of a truly transformational administration. In the beginning, that transformational character was apparent. You signed an executive order closing down the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, giving hope to those of us who still believed in the Constitution as well as the knowledge that America was not exempt from following the rules of the Geneva Convention, no matter how justified it felt its actions were, or how safe it perceived its actions as being. Your cabinet choices also proved your willingness to be diverse and invite those who most would consider rivals into your inner sanctum. It was clear that Lincoln meant a lot to you.

But the hope that we had during your campaign proved to be short-lived. Over the last seven months you have refused to prosecute those who committed torture and expanded the Bush domestic surveillance program. Those of us who voted for you and who believed in true justice were stunned at such actions and remain stunned to this day. And now you are transferring detainees from Gitmo to Bagram in Afghanistan, in essence circumventing the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush. Appalling. It seems, Mr. President, that in this arena of foreign policy, the only difference between you and your predecessor is that your justifications are more lucidly articulated. But they are no less offensive in the annals of international law. A Harvard Law graduate should know better.

But the glass is not completely empty with respect to foreign policy. There are several bright spots in your young administration that are noteworthy, among them your stance with regard to active engagement in the Middle East. You at least have acknowledged that the cowboy diplomacy, so widely adhered to by your predecessor, was clearly not working. Your decision to stay out of the Iranian election debacle, when virtually all of your opponents demanded you to intervene, was a sign of true presidential wisdom; the likes of which hasn’t been seen in this country for quite some time. You have also shown courage with regard to Israel, challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, no small feat given the powerful pro-Israel groups within America. Bravo, Mr. President, on this one!

Domestically you have had your ups and downs. True enough, you inherited the worst economic meltdown since the Hoover Administration and you needed to act quickly and decisively to avert a national calamity. While virtually every respected economist agreed that doing nothing, which is what most of your opponents were recommending, would’ve been disastrous for the economy, nearly all agreed that the manner you went about first the stim package and then the budget left way too much opportunity for your adversaries to define what it was you were attempting to accomplish. Off loading both the stim and budget process to the Congress was an error that could’ve been averted had you simply been more involved. Working with Congress is laudable; letting it run riot over two huge spending bills with your name attached to it was the height of naïveté.

One would’ve thought you learned your lesson from those two experiences, but alas, you repeated the mistake with the health-care reform bill. Once more you set out lofty goals for a program that was badly needed and long overdue, and once more you stood on the sidelines and allowed Congress to define and draft it. This time your opponents had a field day. The August town-hall meetings and the astro-turf Tea Party demonstrations were the result of intense corporate underwriting and relentless conservative rantings, coupled with rank, amateurish, rookie mistakes of an administration that should’ve seen the woods ahead, but instead drove headlong into them. The resultant car wreck now threatens the success of a reform bill that millions desperately need and the nation cannot survive without.

Your excuse? You were trying to avert a repeat of the Clinton Administration’s disastrous health care reform bill, which they tried to ram down the throat of Congress and which Congress promptly rammed right back at them. Fair enough. The Legislative branch has historically treated such attempts with predictable contempt. But, the opposite of arrogance isn’t apathy, Mr. President. It behooved you to find a middle ground where you could’ve met with senior congressional leaders, outlined specifics you wanted in the bill, co-wrote parts of it, and then left the rest up to Pelosi and Reid. By the time you got directly involved your opponents had an eight-week jump and had claimed a moral high ground they never should’ve been allowed to have. You became the poster child for socialism and death panels, principally due to your unwillingness to roll up your sleeves and directly take on your political enemies. That more people fear the government than the insurance industry is based not on any real facts, but the sort of fear mongering that the Right is extremely adept at. Shame on you, sir, for allowing that to happen; especially when it was avoidable.

And now we come to the crux of your real dilemma: the issue of your political opponents and the dire threat they represent to your presidency. Heated debates and partisan politics are part of our history and as old as the Republic itself. Jefferson and Adams loathed each other and threw everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at one another. Teddy Roosevelt so despised Republican William Taft that he ran against him for President as an independent, thus assuring the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Talk about spite. And more recently, your Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, was so reviled among his Republican rivals, they stopped at nothing in trying to bring down his administration. Though with all due respect to the Republicans they did have a little help in the form of Clinton’s indiscretions that unfortunately would end up defining his presidency.

My point, Mr. President, is that mud-slinging, bitter rivalries and personal attacks are facts of life in politics, as you well know. But what is occurring in this nation over the last few months is owed not principally to a divisive political discourse, but has its genesis in something far deeper and more insidious. It goes back farther than the mere divide of political parties, farther even than the Republic itself. The principle issue before us, Mr. President, is race.

Like most political pundits, we all figured that the true test of the nation was whether we were mature and advanced enough to elect an African American to the office of President. What we did not count on was that the real test would not come until you actually assumed the office. It was at that moment that we as a nation came face to face with an even uglier truth about ourselves: that there were certain elements in our society that simply could not accept being governed by a black man, especially a black man who is the chief executive of the country. They are mad as hell and they aren’t shy about strutting their racism.

Make no mistake about it, Mr. President, it is racism, pure and simple. Jimmy Carter, a life-long southerner, who witnessed overt and covert examples of racism in his native Georgia, said it best.

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans."

You should take Carter at his word, Mr. President. It isn’t just the South. I have witnessed small examples of such attitudes in my own home town. Your mere presence in the Oval Office has stirred up centuries of hatred, which is both irrational and potentially dangerous. Some of the language used at town-hall meetings and Tea Party demonstrations has been particularly racist and demonstrably violent in its tone. These are no mere adversaries voicing their opposition to a particular political party or policy; they are mobs looking for someone to string up. Look at the pictures, Mr. President, look at them. Do you not see the correlation between your caricatures and the lynchings that took place in the segregated South?

You know there is truth in my words, and worse yet, so does the Secret Service. Death threats against you are four times more numerous than they were for your predecessor, which is quite a statement given how unpopular he was during the last two years of his administration. Failure to call this what it is, in the vain hope that time will lead to cooler heads prevailing and a peaceful resolution will take place is about as naïve as Neville Chamberlain declaring he had achieved “peace for our time” by appeasing Hitler. Less than a year later World War II started. This is not a political circus, as you so flippantly put it during your interview with 60 Minutes last Sunday. This is the prelude to a potential national tragedy that is unfolding before our very eyes and sadly right under your nose. Waiting for “responsible” right-wing conservative talk show hosts to “dial down” their rhetoric and call out their minions is foolhardy. Just what is it you expect from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh?

Mr. President, you must act, and act now. You must look those who mean you harm right in the eye and say, “Bring it on!” You must openly refute the lies and distortions that are quickly gaining traction with many of the populace by calling out the racist elements contained within them. You would prefer, I’m sure, to let bygones be bygones and behave as an adult, believing that your foes will come to their senses and see the light. Trust me, Mr. President, they will not see the light; nor do they want to. Hearts lost in darkness will never see the light of reason. And that is why it falls on you to be that light.

This is not the time for pragmatism or taking the high road. That shipped sailed a while back. The relentless assault by right-wing, extremist elements within the Republican Party want nothing less than your removal from office and before the 2012 election. While stopping just short of implying assassination, the tone of this group could hardly be confused with that of pacifists. There are times when you seek peaceful coexistence; and other times when you fight fire with fire. Guess which time this is, Mr. President?

Perhaps you are thinking this is impossible given all we’ve been through in this country. Certainly we have progressed far enough so that we can have an intelligent debate on the real issues without sinking to the depths of our most base fears and prejudices. Certainly America is better than this. I wish this were so. But it isn’t, and the last few months have born this out. Men showing up at town-hall meetings with loaded weapons sporting signs with comments too crude to include here with your picture on it, are way beyond having adult discussions with. They are thugs who are no better than the ruffians who routinely beat and hung African Americans in the old South simply because they could get away with it. Like Hitler’s Storm Troopers, they are driven by hatred, pure and simple. You do not reason with hatred, Mr. President, you defeat it.

I was only two years old when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. It had been almost a century since the nation had a sitting president assassinated and one could almost forgive the Secret Service for not being totally prepared for the possibility of it happening on their watch. That mistake cost the nation dearly. Forty-six years later, we are again faced with the real threat of assassination against a sitting president. There is no excuse now for not being prepared. The actors in this potential tragedy have not hidden their sentiments; in deed they have made them all too clear. It would be doubly criminal if as President your intellect, your higher ideals if you will, clouded your judgment and further encouraged an unstable individual to attempt the unspeakable.

The ball is in your court, Mr. President. You can do with it as you wish. For now, you are the chief executive of the country. It is high time you acted like it. It is high time you led by example and put those who are out of line in their proper place. Your predecessor had no such difficulties in this area. Of all the shortcomings George Bush had, one of them was not timidity. He did what he felt was best for the country, no matter how it was perceived. That he was wrong in his judgment most of the time should not be an excuse for not following, at least in this manner, in his footsteps. To do so would be akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Shame On You!

Top honors in this month’s celebrity underachieving contest are hardly newsworthy, but one is a newcomer to this blog.

I’ve changed the name of this particular segment at least two times, looking for just the right title. First I went with “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” which I thought was quite catchy until I realized that the winners were in fact guilty of making stuff up, so next I came up with a line from the movie Forrest Gump, “Stupid Is As Stupid Does.” Again, it had a ring to it, until I realized that stupid didn’t quite suffice. Many people can be stupid, without being hypocritical or posing a threat to our nation. And besides, I was overcome by a conviction that no matter how reprehensible their conduct might be, I could not resort to the same lowering and debasing tactics. Calling someone stupid may bring me some momentary relief, but in the long run it undermines my whole argument against their actions in the first place.

Until some all-encompassing slogan or banner comes to mind, “Shame On You” will have to do. Only three nominees this month, and believe me it was hard choosing. The envelope please?

Sarah Palin. She is quickly earning frequent flyer miles on this blog. At the rate she is going she will have enough to fly back and forth between Alaska and Washington D.C. at least a couple of times. It is difficult to decide which comments she makes on her facebook page that are the most egregious – there are so many from which to choose – but this last one, dare I say, takes the cake.

“Finally, President Obama delivered an offhand applause line tonight about the cost of the War on Terror. As we approach the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and honor those who died that day and those who have died since in the War on Terror, in order to secure our freedoms, we need to remember their sacrifices and not demonize them as having had too high a price tag.”

Whatever air Ms. Palin might be breathing, or substance she might be consuming, her incomprehensibility and ignorance is matched only by her insolence. What Palin was referring to is an excerpt from President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress Wednesday night in which he said the following:

“Now, add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.”

Now while I realize that jumping from A to C is a prerogative of politicians and political pundits alike, jumping from real universe to alternate reality seems to be the prerogative of some incredibly unstable and unsavory individuals, among whom Ms. Palin has developed quite a following. These latest remarks are yet another attempt – and lame at that – to read into something that which isn’t there.

Accusing the President of demonizing the troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan is cheap politics and beneath even the likes of Palin. If it is politicizing the war on terror that Palin is concerned about, then she and the entire Republican Party should look in the mirror because they have been guilty as sin of doing it. The images at the Republican National Convention of the Twin Towers on fire during the 9/11 attacks were gutless attempts at invoking fear and intolerance for political gain. Shame on you, Ms. Palin for even suggesting such a disgusting thing about another individual when your own Party stinks of it. The same Party by the way that Rudy Giuliani, who mentioned 9/11 during his campaign more times than he mentioned verbs, continues to call his own. Give me a break, lady!

In deed, not only did she deliberately twist what the President said, when she did manage to quote him she failed to be thorough. Note the ... in the following passage, “make sure that no government bureaucrat .... gets between you and the health care you need.” What Palin left out - what the ... represents - is "insurance company bureaucrat." That Palin should deliberately omit that not too small reference is obvious. To include it would undermine the whole point of her argument and that of the astroturf protesters at town-hall meetings. The point is that there has been and continues to be bureaucrats standing between you and your doctor. They work for the insurance industry, and Palin and her ilk know that full well. Feigning ignorance is one thing; pretending to have the country's best interest when all you care about are the corporate lobbyists who line your pocketbook is quite another. Give us all a break, Ms. Palin and go away; far, far away. Where is there a moose when you need it most?

Our runner up, William Kristol, apparently got all the talking points down and even managed to expound on them. Take it away, Bill.

“Two of my favorite bloggers, Jim Ceaser of the University of Virginia, and Sarah Palin of the University of Real America” (you are joking are you not, Bill?), “were particularly struck by one line in President Obama’s speech last night. As was I.”

Kristol then goes on to quote Obama’s line about his healthcare plan costing less than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which is more than Palin did.

"What’s the implication? Apparently, that we shouldn’t have spent so much on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fair enough, perhaps, with respect to the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed. On the other hand, Obama has supported the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, he’s criticized the Bush administration for under-resourcing that effort. ...”

“For the president, in a formal address to Congress, to suggest even in passing that these struggles are merely distasteful burdens rather than worthwhile missions, is appalling. Sarah Palin is right: Obama’s “offhand applause line” was an insult to those who have fought and sacrificed, and to those who are now fighting and sacrificing, on our behalf.”

Kristol has been an over the top apologist for Palin ever since she was picked by John McCain last year to be his vice presidential running mate, and there can be little doubt as to where his loyalties lie, right alongside his journalistic integrity, no doubt, but there is a line that even the most cynical and unabashed conservatives would scarcely consider crossing and both Palin and Kristol crossed it. Reducing yourself to the level of a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck may play well in those parts of the country where crazy still sells, but it besmirches the very ideals for which all writers, be they Right or Left, are supposed to aspire to. Shame on you, Mr. Kristol for lowering your already narrow viewpoint still further into the mud.

Paul Thorton of the L.A. Times said it best.

“The president was calling out as hypocrites Republicans who voted for President Bush's expensive tax cuts and supported two expensive (and off-budget) wars, but who now use deficits and excessive government spending to argue against healthcare reform."

"Obama could have further argued that extending healthcare coverage to all Americans is a more worthwhile endeavor than dispatching hundreds of thousands of American troops to another hemisphere to fight two wars. But Obama didn't say that, and he certainly didn't go far enough for Kristol and Palin to accuse a sitting American president of disrespecting the memory of those who died fighting wars on our behalf.”

But bringing up the rear, sometimes quite literally, is our dear old friend Sean Hannity. Apparently it has been a while since Sean visited his ear doctor because on his program Wednesday night he falsely claimed that President Obama said during his healthcare speech that insurance company executives are "bad people," and that Obama's remarks took him back because they were so harsh. In fact, as was made clear by the video Hannity himself showed, Obama said just the opposite -- that "insurance executives don't treat their customers badly because they're bad people; they do it because it's profitable."

HANNITY: One of the things, Frank, you have been very, very clear about -- and I think our audience has learned a lot from you as we've done our dial groups and our focus groups, etc. -- is this tendency to go negative. And he had a very different tone on Monday, but when he said tonight that insurance executives are bad people, it took me back because it was so harsh, and I think unfair, but it's part of their polling. Let's roll this tape, and I want to get your reaction to it.

OBAMA [video clip]: Without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down. And it makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly by cherry-picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest, by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage, and by jacking up rates. Insurance executives don't do this because they're bad people; they do it because it's profitable.

HANNITY: What'd you think?

FRANK LUNTZ (GOP pollster): I think that he's trying to demonize a segment of American society, and through the work that I've done, he may be successful, Sean. Because the American people don't think too highly of insurance companies or the people who run it.

Now Luntz could have an entire segment of Shame on You all to himself. This was the guy who coined the phrase “Death Tax” when it had always been known as “Estate Tax.” As early as this past May, Luntz warned the GOP not to oppose healthcare reform directly, but instead mention things like "Washington takeover of healthcare" and "long waiting lines" for patients. He was one of several key figures in the drafting of the strategy for taking on Obama during the last few months. A despicable individual if ever there was one.

But the point here is that two supposed adults, both supposedly with functioning ears, heard the President’s words and both intentionally twisted and distorted them. The sad truth is that most of the audience probably didn’t catch it or wouldn't have minded very much even if they had. Well, we mind, and that’s the important thing. Shame on you, Mr. Hannity for flat out lying and manipulating your gullible fan base, if you can call it that.

Enough Already!

Fear and Loathing in America and Why It Must Stop Now.

The revelation that an Arizona pastor by the name of Steven Anderson publicly said to his congregation that he hopes “God strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy” should not shock or come as a surprise to anyone who has been carefully monitoring the public discourse in this country over the last couple of months. While it was gratifying to know that there are only thirty people who attend this church that is hardly the point. As has been mentioned by me several times the mood of some of the country is turning extremely ugly and volatile towards this president and unless something is done a real tragedy could be in the offing.

This is not just hyperbole; it is a fact. The Secret Service is struggling to cope with a huge number of threats being made against President Obama, according to the author of a new book on the agency “In the President’s Secret Service”. Threats against the President have quadrupled since Obama took office to some 30 a day, few of which are publicized for fear of attracting copycats, according to writer Ronald Kessler. The extremist views of many conservative pundits have grown way beyond mere demagoguery; they are analogous to gasoline being poured on an open flame. Citizens showing up at town hall meetings with loaded weapons, signs with Obama wearing a Hitler mustache, congressmen being hanged in effigy are becoming more and more the norm among this lot. Wingnuts like Glenn Beck openly suggest on the air that the Speaker of the House should drink poison and nothing is done to discipline him. An abortion doctor is gunned down in the sanctuary of a church and no one from the Religious Right condemns the act. And on the Left, no one in power challenges the President’s decision to continue the domestic surveillance program, started under George Bush, for fear of being branded “soft” on terror by the right-wing zealots.

Insanity, thy name is the United States of America.

There has been a stunning lack of true dialogue on what probably is the most important issue of our generation: health care reform. How will we pay for it? Will it add to the budget deficit? Will it bring down overall health care costs and bring true reform to a broken system? Will it bring health care to all of the uninsured and help those who are under-insured? These are the important discussions that the nation should be having. Instead the discussion has been about socialism and death panels. Mention socialism and death in the same sentence and watch what happens. It’s like seeing a fireworks display on the Fourth of July, only it’s not beautiful, it’s appallingly ugly. Decidedly angry and frightened people are being riled up to a frenzy by diseased and despicable individuals about an issue few of them know anything about and they are drowning out any hope for a true debate, thus killing any hope for a real solution to a problem most know must be dealt with sooner or later and threatens our very national security.

Insanity, thy name is the United States of America.

Lobbyists are buying off both sides of the political aisle in order to protect their own narrow interests no matter who suffers as a result. In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, there were approximately 300 registered lobbyists in Washington. By 2000 that number swelled to 16,342 and it more than doubled by 2005 to almost 35,000. Our entire democratic institution has been infected by greed, corruption and fear mongering. The ignorant and the gullible are being manipulated into believing in falsehoods; all the while the true boogeyman is left unchecked and unchallenged, laughing all the way to the proverbial bank.

And now this moron above. I wish I could state that this sick individual was unique. Sadly, I cannot. He has become the poster child for a malevolent fascist-like movement spreading throughout the country that has now grown to almost full bloom status. The hate emanating from these groups is frightening and extremely dangerous. They are not interested in dialogue; what they want is nothing short of complete victory. No other viewpoint is permissible. They resemble in every way imaginable the brown shirted Nazis of the early 1930s: brutal and formidable. Their hatred for anything not sympathetic to their cause holds no bounds. They are “pro-American” the same way European fascist movements in Europe are pro-European. They want no part of anything that smacks of multi-culturalism, diversity, pluralism, or even a hint of liberalism. They are racist and paranoid. They take passages out of the Bible and pervert them to suit their myopia. They deliberately distort what the Founding Fathers said to achieve their own political ends. In the long run they seek not the continuation of the Republic, but its destruction.

Insanity, thy name is the United States of America.

This whole thing reminds me of the 1946 novel “All The King’s Men” which was made into a movie in 1947. The central character of Willie Stark (often simply referred to as "the Boss") undergoes a radical transformation from an idealistic lawyer and weak gubernatorial candidate into a charismatic and extraordinarily powerful governor. In achieving this office Stark comes to embrace various forms of corruption and builds an enormous political machine based on patronage and intimidation. His approach to politics earns him many enemies in the state legislature, but does not detract from his popular appeal among many of his constituents, who respond with enthusiasm to his fiery populist manner.

Stark's character is often thought to be inspired by the life of Huey P. Long, former governor of Louisiana and that state's U.S. senator in the mid-1930s. Huey Long was at the zenith of his career when he was assassinated in 1935; just a year earlier, Robert Penn Warren had begun teaching at Louisiana State University. Stark, like Long, is shot to death in the state capitol building by a physician.

Sadly, there is no silver bullet that can put down this sick movement the way Stark was brought down. For that, we will have to rely on our own efforts. The good news is that despite the apparent magnitude of these groups, they are not representative of the majority of Americans. Most of the nation – the silent majority – is far more rational and desirous of asking questions and discussing solutions. Most find such behavior as described above to be abhorrent.

But therein lies the bad news. For while the majority of the country is far more rational and open-minded, it is also largely silent. Most dismiss the lunacy of a Rush Limbaugh or the rantings of a Mark Levin as emblematic of a pathological complex bent on self-aggrandizing, nothing more. Many tune in for the entertainment value eager to hear what outlandish thing they will say next. Stupid, but hardly dangerous. History is replete with examples of silent majorities being out done by determined and extremist minorities. After all they laughed at Hitler, didn’t they?

It’s time to stop laughing. It is time to be dead serious. For our foe is not some buffoonish clown who simply throws a temper tantrum like some spoiled brat when he doesn’t get his way. What is at work here is far more hideous and evil than mere political grand standing. Its aim is total victory no matter the costs. That a few intellectual conservatives like David Brooks and even David Frum have called out the radical elements within the Republican Party is laudable, but insufficient. We need to take this on as our number one agenda. The way to fight back is not to sit back and hope that cooler heads prevail; it is to replace darkness with enlightenment, lies with truth, and despair with hope. When we hear or see any one stain the faith we hold dear by hoping that anyone gets cancer, we must call it out immediately as evil. When politicians are bought off by powerful lobbyists we must get proactive and voice our disgust. When conservative pundits shout out lies and rile up misinformed people we must be there to educate them on the truth.

If we do not stand for something we will go for anything. The Brownshirts in Germany counted on and got, by and large, apathy from the general population. By the time most of them woke up, Hitler was the Führer. We cannot let that happen here. I believe there is still time. If all of us – the rational ones I mean – stand up and denounce this movement, we can prevent a national tragedy. If we don’t, we will have no one else to blame but ourselves.