August's GOP Asshat of the Month

I'll spare readers any mirage of suspense because the contest for this month's King Assclown isn't a contest at all. Virginia Senator George Allen may very well have ended his political career on August 11th when, at a campaign rally in the lily-white southwestern corner of Virginia, he publicly (into a video camera no less) referred to an Indian-American campaign worker of his opponent as "Macaca", a racial slur in much of the world with origins to a species of monkeys. Allen dug his grave even further by calling the young man "Macaca" once again within the context of the condescending comment, "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Turns out this young man was born and raised in America, specifically "the real world of Virginia". Allen chose to further embarrass himself after receiving well-deserved scrunity for the obnoxious comments, saying his "macaca" comment was made in reference to the man's "mohawk" haircut. The only trouble is, the young man didn't have a mohawk or anything resembling a mohawk.....and he was wearing a hat at the time the comment was. After a week's worth of bad press, Allen finally capitualated and began apologizing....and then apologizing some more. Once a politician makes a racially insensitive remark in today's culturally touchy times, he's already in trouble. But once he's forced to make more than one apology to quell the public and/or media outrage, he's officially screwed.

I'm not in a position to opine on whether George Allen is a racist (although his already shaky reputation on the issue wasn't improved by this latest gaffe), but I am in a position to opine that George Allen is a jerk. To treat somebody with that level of disrespect based on his/her ethnic origin (in front of a crowd full of crackers, no less) is the work of a playground bully who gets off on punching the kid who's "different" in the stomach and stealing his lunch money. At this point, everyone should accept Allen's apology and move on, but it'll be much harder for people to forget than it will be to forgive.

From a political standpoint, George Allen's Presidential ambitions have likely been snuffed out. Perhaps no other potential candidate on the Republican side would be better able to bridge the interests of the GOP's bible-thumping theocrats and robber baron constituencies better than Allen. Many leading political analysts considered Allen a frontrunner for the nomination....but that was before "8-11". It's very hard to see how Allen can recover from a PR nightmare like this, even among Republican primary voters who have plenty of "Plan B" candidates to fall back on rather than risk driving off a cliff with Allen. In fact, Allen will be lucky to salvage his Virginia Senate seat. Following the comments, Allen's worthy Democratic challenger James Webb rose from a 12-point deficit in the polls to a three-point deficit. Perhaps what we were told in elementary school was true.....maybe bullies really do get theirs in the end.

The Minnesota State Fair Scores Again

Last Saturday, I attended another Minnesota State Fair, my 21st annual trip to the "Great Minnesota Get-Together" only one day after beginning my 29th trip around the sun (or technically, my 30th I suppose, perish the thought). It's a late summer tradition that I'll be sure to maintain until the pry that pronto pup from my cold, dead hand.

There is a wealth of attractions at the Minnesota State Fair, but it's hard to describe its appeal to anyone who hasn't attended. There's an intangible energy that one feels just being there, and you can feel it just walking through the gate. I felt that way the first time I went to the fair back in 1986 and ended up needing a security escort to help remove my petrified nine-year-old self from the haunted mansion.....and I felt that way just last year while attending the free concert from the 1980's country group Restless Heart, who wrapped up their show with a blazing performance of the hard rockin' "Big Dreams in a Small Town", one of my all-time favorite tunes. Every year in between, the Minnesota State Fair has come through for me in one way or another with some good times and great memories.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in my acclaim for the Minnesota State Fair. Several reports last week indicated that most state fairs across the nation are struggling while Minnesota's continues to break past attendance records. Two weeks ago, I had a chance to visit Iowa's State Fair, often competing with Minnesota for "best state fair in the country" designation for the first time. I gotta say....it was pretty impressive. The fairgrounds was probably only half the size of Minnesota's, but they packed in the crowd and offered some uniquely interesting exhibits. Minnesota's fair will always be my favorite, but you can be sure I'll return to Iowa's next year as well. As a fair fan, I feel pretty lucky to have access to the two most successful state fairs in the country.

I'm noticing from daily attendance records on the Minnesota State Fair websites that crowds this year have been off a bit from 2005. While the small reduction in attendance is far from troubling at this point, I'm hopeful it's not indicative of a decline in interest. It most likely isn't, but I still have to give a push to my Minnesota readers to make the trip up Snelling Avenue at some point in the next five days to enjoy the Minnesota State Fair. It's a trip well worth your time and admission cost.

"Prison Break" Returns

I forgot to make note of this on Monday, but the best show on television (since MacGyver, of course) is returning early for its second season. Prison Break returned for its second act on Monday, August 21, picking up where last season left off. For those who missed it, Fox is airing an encore tonight at 9/8 central. For those who missed the entire first season, it came out on DVD on August 8 and should be the shelves of your favorite retailer (as long as that isn't Wal-Mart!) as we speak. Give the show a try. It's far-fetched beyond belief, but brilliantly crafted escapist fun with all the kinetic energy of 24.

The 2006 Republican Game Plan, Redux: Keep 'Em Terrified!

Remember those quaint days before September 11, 2001, when it was the Republicans who accused the Democrats of having nothing to offer but fear, particularly as it concerned seniors losing Social Security and Medicare? Social Security in an "iron-clad lock box"? Accusations of a "MediScare"? We've all been told a million times over how "the world changed on September 11", and one of the very obvious ways in which it changed is that the Republicans now have exclusive ownership of the politics of fear. And unlike the Democrats of the late 20th and very early 21st centuries "scaring seniors" about the very Social Security and Medicare programs that Republicans attempted to disassemble at the first available opportunity, Republican fear-mongering post-9/11 is far more ominous, laced with cataclysmic language about a "fight for our survival".

While GOP exploitation of post-9/11 paranoia hadn't reared its ugly head for quite awhile, last week's terrorist plot thwarted by British intelligence brought it back to our doorstep like a freeloading uncle, timed in convenient correspondence with an upcoming election where the incumbent party appears likely to take it on the chin. The logic, using that term as loosely as humanly possible, is that because most in the opposition party want an exit strategy from refereeing a civil war in Iraq, they cannot be trusted to protect the homeland from unconnected al-Qaeda terrorists planning attacks on the U.S. hundreds of miles away from Iraq. Come again? And the fact that this terrorist plot was thwarted almost exclusively by British intelligence rather than anyone connected to the Bush administration matters not at all to desperate Republicans who were issuing press releases about the "Defeat-o-crats" within hours after a foreign country's intelligence stopped an airborne terrorist attack.

Even though the premise is nonsensical to anyone capable of adding two plus two and coming up with four, the strategy could very well work once again for the GOP as the only issue where Republicans get better marks than Democrats in public opinion polls is "national security". Again, there is precious little reason why this should be the case. In 2001, the Bush administration didn't hold a single staff meeting about terrorism until the week before the 9-11 attacks, despite warnings from Clinton administration intelligence predecessors of the dire threat that al-Qaeda posed to America. They even managed to ignore Presidential Daily Briefings in the summer of 2001 entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States" because it was a distraction from their obsessive plans to invade Iraq. And on the morning of 9-11, more than an hour's worth of mind-blowing incompetence by virtually every Federal anti-terrorist agency mucked up efforts to stop the hijacked jetliners from reaching their targets. Had it not been for Todd Beamer and his fellow passengers bravely charging the hijackers in their plane above southwestern Pennsylvania, the terrorists would have been 4-0 in striking their targets on September 11, 2001....all on the watch of a government dominated by a single party which has convinced Americans that it's the only one capable of keeping them safe.

Nearly four years later, a catastrophic natural disaster struck the Gulf coast while an indifferent Bush administration yawningly twiddled its thumbs. The Department of Homeland Security, which had been created in 2002 and which Republicans accused then Democratic Senator Max Cleland of Georgia of being one and the same as Osama bin Laden for not rubber-stamping, got its first test following Hurricane Katrina, and performed so miserably and incompetently that even a thesaurus couldn't find adjectives dramatic enough to describe the magnitude of its failure. Again, this all happened on the watch of "the only political party capable of defending us" from, among other images thrown at us in the 2004 Presidential election, attacking wolves.

To be fair here, the Democrats have been selling a bill of goods themselves this year, pretending that the current trainwreck in Iraq will change course if Democrats take over Congress this fall. That is not the case. The nation's ability to stop driving off the cliff in Iraq was squandered when John Kerry got three million fewer votes than George W. Bush on November 2, 2004. After authorization for war is awarded by Congress, wartime policy is almost exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Commander in Chief, and even if the Dems take back Congress, they won't have nearly as large of a majority as they'll need to strongarm Bush on Iraq. The double-edged sword for Republicans with that reality is that their propaganda of fear regarding what would happen if the Democrats take back Congress rings equally hollow. Even when one considers the bipartisan membership elected to the Armed Services Committees of the respective parties, it would generally be the same people receiving the same information whether Richard Lugar or Joe Biden is the committee chairman. The premise that we'd see this wholesale transformation of policy if the Democrats won Congress is just more of the same Republican snake oil they've been peddling for the last two election cycles.

But so it goes. The Republicans won elections in 2002 and 2004 by making sure the electorate was sufficiently terrified and under the impression that nobody who wasn't under the direct partisan supervision of George W. Bush was capable of keeping them safe. It's understandable that the Republicans believe their only route to salvation in 2006 is to make sure voters have piddle-stained underwear when they tremble their way into the voting booth in November. With that in mind, check the floors at your polling stations this November 7. If the floors are wet with panic-fueled pools or voter urine, it's probably an ominous sign that Republicans will have another winning election cycle. If the floors are dry, the good guys may yet pull it off.

Without a "Joebituary", CT-Sen Result Was Worst-Case Scenario

My worst nightmare played out last night in the Connecticut Senate primary. Don't get me wrong. I'm not enamored with Joe Lieberman by any stretch. But neither was I overly impressed with victorious challenger Ned Lamont or especially the fact that this battle was chosen in the first place when Democrats' ONLY priority this year should have been defeating Republicans in November. Nonetheless, the situation is what it is, so one of two scenarios would have been the least damaging last night.....

The first would have been a Lieberman victory of any margin. It would have prevented the media narrative of "Democrats at war with themselves" that we'll be bombarded with over the next few weeks (as opposed to the fact that Republicans are getting their asses handed to them in polls across the country). But even this scenario would have had a downside because Lieberman is no so thoroughly despised by anti-war Democrats in Connecticut that his critics wouldn't have bothered to show up at the polls in November without Lamont on the ballot, making the Congressional defeats of three vulnerable Republican incumbents in the state (Rob Simmons, Christopher Shays, Nancy Johnson) very unlikely to have happened.

The second favorable scenario would have been a Lamont blowout, as was predicted in the polls. If Lamont had won by double digits, as I had predicted last week. Squabbling by the media and Republican pundits would have hit fever pitch just as it has today, but it would have scarcely mattered because Lieberman would have taken such a hit that his independent bid wouldn't have gotten much traction in the face of such a widespread rejection.

Unfortunately, neither of those scenarios occurred. The worst scenario played out, where Lamont pulled out a nailbiter, dividing Democrats and emboldening Lieberman to proceed with his egomaniacal and sour grapes independent bid. Republicans and media sharks will have a field day with this, and the fact that Lamont's victory speech was given with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the background will only add to the embarrassment. And the hypothetical I outlined last week looks downright prophetic already, right down to the candidate. Republicans in Missouri are reportedly about to run an ad challenging red-state Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill to choose sides between "the extremists" and "her party's 'honorable' former Vice-Presidential candidate".

Almost to the letter, I was correct in predicting the potential for a weeks-long or even months-long PR bloodbath in the wake of a Lieberman defeat. I'm more convinced than ever of that happening given the specifics of last night's outcome.

With all that said, I always found Joe Lieberman to be a decent guy, even if he was far from my favorite Democrat and a bit of a sanctimonious moral elitist. I was prepared to feel kind of bad for the guy in the wake of his defeat last night. Boy, was I wrong. The guy pissed me off big-time when his cheap, $15-per-month campaign blog crashed and he accused liberal bloggers of hacking into it, without any proof. If (or more likely when) his accusations are disproven by a thorough investigation, he could have some well-deserved egg on his face for that slanderous stunt.

And then, rather than offering anything in the way of a public concession to Lamont, he immediately announced to the world that he was not going to abide by voters wishes and would run as an independent rather than take his primary defeat like a man. This is a pattern with Lieberman, who has elevated his personal interests above and beyond that of the party or the voters. Back in 2000, his Senate seat was up on the same night as the Presidential race. Despite pleas by the party to abandon his Senate run, let another Connecticut compete for the seat, and focus on winning the Presidency, Lieberman chose to hedge his bets and run for the Senate and VP simultaneously, knowing that if he and Gore had won, Connecticut's Republican Governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman's seat. The way things played out on Election Night 2000, if a few dozen votes in Florida had went the other way, Gore and Lieberman would have been headed to the Oval Office....and the Senate seat Lieberman would be forfeiting would have been the difference, handing Republicans control of the Senate when the Dems would have otherwise won it back. But it was all about Joe.

The consequences of Lieberman's ego could be even worse this time, throwing his party under the bus and forcing a nasty intraparty distraction at its most opportune moment for regaining power. Once again, it's all about Joe. I've lost all respect for the man.

What does this mean for this race in the general election? Hard to say. Lamont may or may not get a bounce from his primary win. I don't sense that he's ready for primetime so the odds of him making a momentum-killing gaffe in the next three months is probably pretty good. On the other hand, Lieberman will find his financial resources drying up quickly now that he's abandoned the Democratic Party. He'll probably get lots of money from Republican interests, which could further erode his standing among the left-of-center electorate in Connecticut. At the very least, he'll lurch fiercely to the right to try to win over Republican voters that could help him win in a three-way race, but that will also trigger a further erosion of support from Democrats and the mostly left-leaning independents in the state. Given all the pitfalls both candidates could face, I'm split right down the middle as to whether I think Lieberman or Lamont will prevail in November. One outcome that definitely won't happen is a victory by Republican Alan Schlesinger, an absolutely awful candidate who was the only guy the GOP could get to challenge Lieberman back when it was perceived to be only a two-candidate race. If the GOP knew then what it knows now, you can bet they'd have run a stronger candidate, but given the fact that they're stuck with Schlesinger, a guy who used a false identity to cover up his huge gambling debts, they're a non-factor in this race.

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that another primary happened last night in the state of Michigan. In the moderately-conservative 7th Congressional district, moderate GOP incumbent Joe Schwarz was defeated by double-digits by fire-breathing right-wing nutball Tim Walberg, a certifiable loony from the Rick Santorum wing of the party. Next month, liberal Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee also faces a primary challenge from the far right. Funny how the same Republicans excoriating Lieberman's primary defeat as "proof that there is no room for moderates in the Democratic Party" can't seem to recognize the irony that their party never passes up the opportunity to purge non-purists from its ranks either. Then again, if we can't count on Republicans to be mindlessly cartoonish hypocrites, what is there we can count on in this world?