If This Were Fiction, No One Would Believe It...

If events in Washington were fictional (sometimes we all wish they were), and we were all part of some screenplay, the first thing a good editor would tell us is to rewrite the whole damn thing, starting with the names.  The conversation might run something like this...


Now you've got to change the names here. You can't have a president who has the middle name Hussein and use that name for your villain in Iraq. And what are the odds that his last name - Obama - shares every letter but one with the other bad guy's first name - Osama? It's weird. 
You're already asking the reader to buy the idea that Americans would vote for a black man after a century of owning them and another century fighting like hell to keep them from voting.   IF that would ever happen, you've got to make it believable, starting with the name.  Only in a novel would more Americans vote for a guy with a name like Barack Hussein Obama than for any presidential candidate ever. Right.  
And it just doesn't seem plausible that this pointy-headed academic Constitutional law professor named Obama would nail Osama in only 2 years when his predecessor - the one with the custom-made flight suit and the Mission Accomplished banner who kept falling off the bike - couldn't do it in 8.   Why build this Bush character up to be a man's man, a brush-clearing, smoke-'em-out, dead-or-alive sort of tough guy only to make him look so ineffective by comparison?    
But that's just the beginning.  Who is this guy Boehner. Really?  Don't tell me how it's SUPPOSED to be pronounced; readers are going to pronounce it as they see it and they will think of what it sounds like.  And this after an administration run by two guys named Dick and Bush?   Right.  
Then you have these shadowy billionaires financing the Tea Party and you just had to call them Koch... no, no, stop telling me how it's SUPPOSED to be pronounced; no reader will look at that name and think of COKE.   And he has to start a party of mostly white guys running around getting all excited and calling each other tea-baggers?   You've managed to take an explicit gay sexual act and turn it into something disgusting. 
And what's the name of this minor character from the Dick and Bush era who gets convicted of obstruction of justice but pardoned by the guy he lied for? Scooter?  You're pulling my leg, right?  I have never met an adult named Scooter.  I don't care if it's a nickname, it's weird.  Next you'll be saying there's a Newt in there... 
Oh, you've got to be kidding me! And this Newt fellow goes after a president for adultery in Act 1, Scene 1, impeaches the guy, but we learn in Act 2 that Newt was committing adultery during the impeachment process?  
And at the end of the book, the guy he went after is more popular than god, touring the world wiping out hunger with a rock star named... Bono; and this same rock star was giving advice to a Republican Treasury secretary about alleviating poverty in Africa and this Republican guy listened?   C'mon.  It's just not believable. 
OK, so Newt gets voted out of office, but makes a come back after writing a series of books on Saving America from - is this right? - a "Right Wing Secular Liberal Machine"?  Those are really his words?   So he's not just a hypocrite, but a nut job.  Readers will feel insulted, especially Republican readers.   The Party of Lincoln, even in a novel, would not stoop that low.  You have to make him likable at some level. 
And you' can't have a bad guy who made off with everyone's money named Madoff, and if you do, you can't have it pronounced that way. It's just way too heavy-handed. And if you're going to have another bad guy caught up in another massive scandal, do you have to call him Abramoff. What is this, Dr. Seuss?
And this Palin lady - at least her name doesn't sound like a body part - but you're seriously going to have her quit halfway through her term in Alaska, sign a multi-million dollar book deal, then claim to be a moose-hunting hockey mom?  She can't have her employer build a sophisticated sound studio in the basement of her house then claim that the "lamestream media" is trying to shut her up because she is conservative.  And lose the "lamestream" part - there is no way a woman with a disabled child would use a word like "lame" in that way.  If we want to like her, she has to have some sensitivity or compassion.
It's way too ironic having her teenage daughter get pregnant after she advocated  abstinence-only education while governor of Alaska. It's like you're making fun of these guys.  Do you think the Republicans would be so dumb as to run her if they knew what a mess her family was.  And no kids - none - are ever REALLY called Track, Trig, Willow, or Piper.  Bristol, fine, that's cute, but then you get her knocked up.  

You just can't make her so dumb.  What person with a pulse, much less one who wants to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, couldn't name a single supreme court decision or newspaper she reads, or thinks Africa is a country?   If you're going to have her talk about death panels why immediately alert the reader to the fact that they don't exist?   It kills the plot; once again we have a bunch of crazy people talking about things that they should know aren't real and why? 

Why not tease the reader along, or write some actual death panels into the plot.  This Obama fellow seems a bit too perfect, too polished, too likable.  If he had some sort of dark secret, this could be it.  But then you have to ask why he would be so stupid as to sneak something into a bill that he himself is signing, not writing. 

Oh, and don't have Palin put cross hairs over a likable Congresswoman whose husband is an ASTRONAUT no less (who just happens to have an identical astronaut twin (right!) who is in charge of the space station) then have this lady get shot.  It's too ironic and heavy-handed.   If you do carry out this ridiculous subplot, at least give Palin some capacity for introspection or remorse.  She can't go comparing herself to victims of the Holocaust or pogroms against Jews.  She sounds not just dumb and irony-challenged, but whiny.  I don't like her and I'll bet most readers won't either.  At least most readers have to be given some reason as to why intelligent voters would ever find such a person appealing. 

And if you're going to have an Axis of Evil introduced in Chapter 2, follow up.  You can't have one country invaded and the other two sort of fizzle out.  I like that phrase, by the way, it's got a nice zing to it, but do two of the countries have to share 3 out of 4 letters - you're asking a lot of American readers not to confuse  Iraq and Iran.  Why not fictionalize one, call it Iraqistan or something, or make the other one Canada?  

And this Birther subplot sounds bizarre.  Why are all these Tea Party guys so convinced the president, the first African American president, is really only African?  And everyone who obsesses over this mysterious birth certificate that you tell the reader in Chapter Three was never in doubt and in fact had been released just happens to be white?  Come on.   Readers do not like racist characters, even crafty villain types and these guys aren't even crafty.  
Readers are going to lose patience with these guys.  I know I did.  Move on already. 
And you can't have these Republicans threatening to go after Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, healthcare for poor children - poor children! - AND help for 9-11 volunteers.  We're talking VOLUNTEERS!  On 9-11!   People would be on the streets if this really happened.  And why?  You're trying to make the case that this party is smart but crafty, but here they just seem dumb, trying to plug a trillion dollar hole with a few pennies.  
I like this Rose character who goes into women's healthcare clinics with a hidden camera to nail workers saying stupid things; you have the beginnings of a likable anti-hero, a single issue woman out to single handedly take on this evil organization, but there has to be more.   The organization has to be evil, or she just looks like another nut.   You can't have her going after a group that mostly provides cancer screening and medical care to poor women and girls.   Again, it sounds mean-spirited.  Why not have her infiltrate a hedge fund or oil company?  
You have all these random characters running around with their pet issues and none of them make any sense at the end of the day.  But you could work with her.  I would make her a former porn star or stripper, someone who maybe felt pressured to have an abortion when she was working her way through college, doing tricks on the side, that sort of thing.  Gets real mad, maybe work in a feminist angle.  Abortion as the subjugation of women or something.  It would be unexpected, counter-stereotypical, and might just work. 
But she has to really find a real scandal, otherwise she just looks like another nutty character pursuing her pet issue.   How about something along the lines of higher ups in this evil organization selling fetal body parts on ebay to a diabolical Chinese manufacturer of puppy dog chow?  Now THAT would be a scandal.   This stuff about a bonehead employee counseling fake pimps about dodging reporting requirements does nothing for me.  It's not the sort of stuff Republican lawmakers would present as evidence on the floor of Congress.  
And lose this white loser side kick who dresses up as the world's most unconvincing pimp and goes after all these black organizations like Acorn and what not.  He's too overtly racist, too much of a scumbag.   I'm telling you, most readers are going to feel that you're mocking them and some do care about these issues.  
That Trump character - Trump is the best you could do? - comes across as an evil megalomaniac with an obsession for birth certificates everyone in the book has seen but him.  How can a guy have a helicopter but not an internet connection?  He looks thoroughly moronic sending his "people" off to Hawaii to look for a birth certificate while the president is busy producing Osama's death certificate.  Readers don't like stupid characters, even villains.  And all this stuff about his hair is gratuitous.  Give him some off-setting virtue, maybe make him a really good juggler or something.  
And I guess that's my biggest problem with the book:  why do all these white people think this Obama guy is so bad?   You've got to make the economy heading toward a depression, not on the mend.  The stock market should be crashing, not double what it was 2 months after he took office.  If he lowered taxes for the very rich and everyone else, but they keep calling him a socialist, after awhile these white guys just look angry and kind of dumb.  It makes no sense.  
Where's the catastrophe?   Where is the deep, dark secret that he is desperately trying to hide?  Look, if you want to make this guy into a disaster, bring some of that bad stuff the Bush and Dick people did, like have Obama be the one deregulate the financial industry, watch it blow up as a result, then turn around and hit up the tax payers for $700 billion to fix his mess.    Can't you move this Hurricane Katrina - the only name I like in the book - to Obama's watch?   Having all these poor black people abandoned by a black president would be a twist; having a rich white guy do it is a stereotype.  Too much.  
I like the oil spill, thought you were going somewhere with that, but it sort of made all those Republicans chanting "Drill, baby, drill!" or whatever sound massively discredited.  Again.  C'mon, they have to do something right. 
Have Bush and Dick find something in Iraq, some suspicious powder, a suicide goat stuffed with plutonium, a diabolical anthrax lab.  They can't go charging in and find nothing; hell, at least have them plant something.  
You can't have all this bad stuff happening on his predecessor's watch, then have him look so good by comparison.
And I've got problems with these other names.  
Like Huckabee. Why not just call him Aw-Shucks-abee? When I hear Huckabee, I think of a barefoot guy on a raft drifting down the Mississippi River with a straw hat and a runaway slave.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not very presidential.
Mitt Romney - is a name maybe we can work with but why not give him a real name like Mitchel or Michael or something. Mitt is something you use in baseball to catch balls.  And frankly, we don't need any images that can be worked into a crude joke, even indirectly.
And you can't have Mitt running against his own healthcare reform plan.  It's just too sloppy, too ironic, plot-wise. 
I guess you have to ask if you're writing farce or fiction.  If it's fiction, it's got to be believable.  Even a farce has to give the Mitts and Newts and Kochs and Boehners some redeeming qualities, starting with their names.  You can't have all these angry white guys with bad names reflexively hating the first African American president for the flimsiest and weirdest of reasons.  There is no way the press in a free country would let them get away with that sort of crap.  No one would ever believe it.  

Bill Maher: “How many Muslims does a black guy have to kill in one weekend before crackers climb down off his @ss?”

This was divinely succinct and funny, boiling a decade's worth of retorts to Republican spin about their failures on so many fronts to a few pithy verbal jabs.  You have to see the video because the delivery is brutally effective. 

Bill Maher: The Party of Stinkin’

BILL MAHER – THE PARTY OF STINKIN’ or GANGSTA PRESIDENT

And finally, new rule. Now that it's become clear that the Republicans, the fiscally conservative, strong on defense party are neither fiscally conservative nor strong on defense ….they have to tell us what exactly it is they're good at. Because….nanano….because it’s not defense – 9/11 happened on your watch, and you retaliated by invading the wrong country.

And you lost a 10-year game of hide and seek with Osama bin Laden.

And you’re responsible for running up most of the debt, which more than anything makes us weak.

You’re supposed to be the party with the killer instinct, when it was a Democrat who put a bomb in Gaddafi’s bedroom and a bullet in bin Laden’s eye like Moe Green.

Raising the question, “How many Muslims does a black guy have to kill in one weekend before crackers climb down off his ass?”

Let’s look at some facts. Now for you FOX News viewers feel free to turn down the sound until the flashing “FACTS” light at the bottom of the screen disappears.

When Bill Clinton left office in 2001 the Congressional Budget Office predicted that by the end of the decade we would have paid off the entire debt and have a $2 trillion surplus. Instead we have a $10.5 trillion public debt, and the difference in those two numbers is mostly because Republicans put tax cuts for the rich, free drugs for the elderly and two wars on the layaway plan and then bailed on the check. So…….so much for fiscal responsibility.

But hey, at least they still have the defense thing, right? The public still believes Republicans were tougher when it came to hunting down dark-skinned foreigners with funny sounding names. But Bush had seven years to get Osama. He didn’t. He got Wesley Snipes.

Only six months after 9/11, Bush said he didn’t spend that much time on bin Laden, that he was no longer concerned about him. Just as he wasn’t before 9/11, when he blew off that mysterious, inscrutable memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack INSIDE the U.S.” In under a year, Bush went from “who gives a shit?” to “wanted dead or alive” and back to “who gives a shit?”. Why focus on the terrorists who reduced Wall Street to rubble when you can help Wall Street reduce the whole country to rubble?

In 2008, the candidates were asked if they knew for sure that bin Laden was in Pakistan would you send our guys in without permission to get him. McCain said no, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation. Obama said yes, he’d just do it, and McCain called him “naïve”. Who’s being naïve, Cain?

And why can’t you just admit that Barack Obama is one efficient, steely nerved, multitasking, black ninja gangsta, President?

In one week he produced his birth certificate, comforted disaster victims, swung by Florida to say “hey” to Gabbie Giffords, did stand-up at the correspondents dinner, and then personally rappelled into bin Laden’s lair and put a Chinese star through his throat without waking up any of his 13 wives. That’s how it went down….I saw it on MSNBC.

Look, 30% of this country will always vote Republican. I’m just asking “why?” Yes, paranoia, greed and racism are fun, but…it’s… it’s like when you see someone driving a Mercury. You think, “did that person really wake up one day thinking ‘you know what car I want to drive?”
A Mercury Mariner “. No, no, you assume he knows someone who sells them or he was molested by a Kia dealer as a child.

And I know this all sounds like harsh truth, but Republicans are supposed to be the party of harsh truths. Like “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.

And speaking of lunch, Obama just ate yours.


  -   transcript source

We can be free and insure our children; indeed, we can't be if we don't

I recently responded to an email equating life in a more progressive society with communism:

"So if you want to imagine what life will be like when the central planners and experts get complete control, just imagine being in the army for the rest of your life, with no chance to ever leave it :)"

I will try to remember that the next time I step outside, considering I live in a country now that has all the things "progressive say they want" and the contrast between Switzerland and the military could not be greater.   All the countries of Western Europe - and I have visited or lived in most of them - have universal healthcare and the idea that this leads inevitably to loss of freedom or stagnation of economic growth is beyond ludicrous.  If there is an exodus of French, Germans, or Swiss fleeing for the United States, I must have completely missed it.  No chains, no camps, no gulags.   Just healthier children and citizens and no risk of losing everything you ever worked for because you get sick between jobs.    On every parameter from infant mortality to teen pregnancy to life expectancy at birth, countries with universal healthcare do far better than we do.  Our own CIA (the same one who just killed Osama bin Laden) ranked us 49th in the world in life expectancy.   49th.

The Commonwealth Fund recently put out a survey of 7 leading countries and where do you think we ranked?  Dead last.   Although we were #1 in one category:  spending (@ $7,290 per citizen, about twice what the other surveyed countries spend).   They pay less and get more, so if you want to reduce waste, you must support healthcare reform (don't you?).   

There are many sorts of freedom and many forms of tyranny.   Europeans are free from having to save a fortune to send their kids to a private college or take them out of failing public schools or pay thousands a year for a for profit health insurance plan.   They pay more for a Big Mac though and our cell phone plans are a bit cheaper, so I guess there are some advantages to life in America.  Personally, I would rather my child did not die from a treatable illness because some gubment-hater was duped into believing that healthcare reform is a "government takeover of healthcare."  But that's just me.

You are confusing being in uniform and having each minute of your life orchestrated by a government with having to pay a nickel more in taxes each day (if that) but a thousand dollars less a month in private insurance premiums.    I think you're also confusing socialism and communism, but I  have given up trying to educate people on this (they do both end in -ism, after all, and the communists called themselves socialists; avoiding socialism because communists misused the word would be like shunning democracy because East Germany called itself "Democratic.")  

"I must be looking at the wrong government bashing websites.  The ones I look at don't say much about 'doing nothing right', but rather focus on government over-reach and over regulation, and massive, massive overspending."

Perhaps you have been out of the country for as long as I have.  Google "Tea Party" or "Koch brothers" or "John Birch Society" (a creation of David Koch's father).   Listen to the pronouncements of the freshmen class of Congress including one of our classmates.  Perhaps Reagan was stuttering when he said that government was not part of the problem, it was the problem.  

Re government over-reach and over-regulation, how does defunding Planned Parenthood, NPR, Head Start, healthcare for 9-11 first responders, or healthcare for poor children, the elderly, and disabled, fit into that scheme?  And I'm not sure increasing government intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship (when the patient is a woman) fits into your libertarian theme anymore than government telling citizens they cannot organize for better working conditions has anything to do with freedom.  

I agree the government, even under Obama, is continuing to deficit spend  (it tends to do that during wars and economic crises such as the one triggered by the deregulation of the smartest guys in the room who brought us the mortgage-backed securities and other job-crushing private initiatives) but I'm not sure I would agree that 5% of GDP is "massive, massive," especially if the deficit was created by a package of tax cuts that cost about 5% of GDP.   If the deficit is "massive, massive" then so are the tax cuts, so thanks for making the case for rolling them back to at least Clinton, if not Reagan, era levels. 

Most government spending is non-discretionary, determined decades ago by legislation, particularly the Great Society programs, and demographics.  You can't plug a 1.5T whole by ignoring 1.5T of tax cuts and defunding $30 or $60 or $90 billion from programs to the poor who did nothing to get us into this mess.   I personally do not mind paying a bit more in taxes so that someone's grandmother does not have to eat cat food or choose between groceries or medicine, or so that returning veterans will have fully-staffed clinics and no veteran will sleep under a bridge one day, but that seems a minority opinion in some circles.  

Let's just all thank the gods that this strike on Osama bin Laden was not outsourced to a private firm but left to professionals whose primary motivation is service to others, not service to self. 

Obama: "You Got a Wedding? I Got a Funeral."

     - I wish I was smart enough and quick enough to think this one up myself, but have to give credit where credit is due.

Osama bin Laden was killed by socialized federal government employees

So Osama bin Laden is dead.   The brave sacrifices of those socialized government workers (Navy seals) and the socialized medical team waiting to save their lives if needed and the socialized flight team who flew them in and out in government vehicles tell us there must be something other than greed that makes people do great things. 

Only last week, many on the right, especially in the Tea Party, were claiming that without greed as a motivator, the titans of industry - CEOs and hedge fund managers - will not be motivated to do great things, producing lots of jobs in the process.  Unless of course you're a teacher, fireman, or cop, earning $50,000 a year, in which case a reverse sort of motivation occurs in which under-performing teachers will improve their performance if their pay and benefits are slashed.

This successful military strike was just the most recent reminder that public servants with no hope of personal enrichment can really amaze us all.   

That was my first thought actually when I saw the rows of white crosses and occasional stars of David at the American cemetery at Normandy - all these guys who laid down their lives for us but all of them public workers, none of them well-paid, but financed by taxpayers who did not flinch at paying 90% top marginal tax rates to support the war of their time.  Greed and materialism simply could not explain this massive human endeavor, this tremendous sacrifice, and it can't explain the far lesser sacrifices we are asked to make today.  I guess that's why we call them the Greatest Generation and although there are few of them out there, that spirit of shared sacrifice and a common community is dying outside of the military. 

I support brilliant businessmen and women, but from what I have seen of those in charge of Enron, Worldcom, Healthsouth, Citigroup, Lehman, and AGI, I am not so sure they are as brilliant as their obscene pay packages should indicate.   

What exactly did Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell do in a recent year (2002) to take home $33,912,294 in compensation?  According to Barrons (no left wing publication), Pfizer could have replaced Mr. McKinnell with 400 researchers to come up with new products. 

I'm not sure what value UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen J. Hemsley added to justify his $98.6 million in exercised stock options in February, 2009.  His company doesn't make or do anything; it just collects premiums, lots of them, then he helps himself to $100 million of them, and pays out what is left out for pap smears and mammograms.   He didn't help the soldiers in this operation.   I'm sure he works hard, but so did the Navy seals and they are not taking home $100 million of other people's money. 

And are CEOs that much smarter than they were when we were kids?  The average CEO made 531 times what the average worker made in 2001 versus 26 times in 1965.  

I'll bet a number of the people risking their lives in this operation have family members on public assistance, public assistance being gutted in many cases to finance tax cuts for CEOs and hedge fund managers.  Many will need help re-adjusting upon their return and that will cost money, lots of it.  

Every returning veteran from World War II got 18 months of unemployment insurance benefits, no questions asked.  It just seemed the right thing to do. 

These things are all linked and it seems those who hate the government and its workers so much in one week that they think it must be slashed to finance tax cuts for a wealthy elite (most of whom have not served in the military and do not have children who will serve), should not turn around the next week when that government has done something brilliant and claim to have supported them all along.   

I am frankly tired of fantastically well-compensated infotainers who make a living jabbing at teachers, firemen, cops, and public servants of all stripes.  I think it's time we jab back a little and ask them to pay their fair share.