October 8, 2018--Susan Collins: My Summer Senator

For half the year in Maine, Susan Collins is one of my senators.

A self-described "moderate Republican" I have yet to see much moderation in her voting record. 

On occasion she sounds moderate like when two years ago she struggled publicly about how to vote on a bill to repeal Obamacare (she eventually voted to eliminate it) and then last week when she seemed to agonize about how to vote when the roll was called to confirm Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Again, she voted the Republican Party line. In fact, she cast the decisive 50th vote. No one up here was surprised by her seeming to have an open mind but when it came to voting acted as one of the most loyal, most robotic of Republicans.

She is so craven that on Friday she took the lead role in dooming the opposition to Kavanaugh.

With a new outfit and dye-job (he hair no longer looking like roadkill), with three female Republican senators like props seated behind her (Deb Fischer [NE], Shelly Capito [WV], and Cindy-Hyde Smith [MS]), with Lisa Murkowski conspicuously absent (she was too busy writing her own profile in courage), Collins spoke for 45 minutes with seeming feeling about the testimony offered by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. She could feel her pain, she claimed without feeling, but since she said there was no corroboration she was going to vote to confirm Kavanaugh.

Not a word did she offer about the deranged conspiracy-laced statement and testimony Kavanaugh offered last Thursday. Not a word about his judicial temperament, mental stability, or his many contemporary under-oath lies. All that mattered for Collins was a lack of clear evidence about something he may or may not have done 36 years ago.

What a disgraceful show she participated in. Perhaps most disgraceful was her willingness, as a woman, with three female coconspirators backing her up, to ignore the testimony of an impressive, deeply wounded woman.

At least no one wore pink.

I am always loath to make comparisons between events in the United States and Nazi Germany, but I cannot shake the feeling that Collins and her colleague female senators acted like concentration camp kapos. Like prisoners who were assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor of fellow prisoners or carry out administrative tasks. For this they were given special privileges. Like blankets and food. 

Collins, who has been in the Senate for 21 too-long years comes cheap. For her staged peregrinations and eventual "capitulation" she chairs just one subcommittee--on aging. How appropriate. 

But for the bit of her soul she sold Saturday, perhaps the majority leader, the already soulless Mitch McConnell (who considers the Kavanaugh confirmation his "proudest moment"), will name her to a real committee, the foreign relations committee, for example which would allow her to junket around the world at our expense.

Mark it on your calendar--she's up for reelection in 2020.

June 6, 2013--Barack Obama and the Khmer Rouge

I’m not much of a sleeper, so to distract myself from middle-of-the-night fretting, I listen to talk radio, thinking it’s so boring it will drive me back to sleep.

I usually listen to sports talk—which is as enervating as it gets--but last night I tuned in to Savage Nation, an eponymous right-wing program hosted by Michael Savage.

Born in the Bronx as Michael Weiner, he is a little unusual because unlike his ilk he has a really good education—a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley--and he has had considerable success in fields other than milking money from Tea Party crazies. Back in the day he even ran with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Timothy Leary.

Knowing him as I do from other late night encounters, I anticipated lots of railing about the IRS, Benghazi, and Eric Holder. I wasn’t prepared for his tirade about the seven female senators on the Armed Services Committee and how they are attempting—with Obama’s open encouragement—to undermine our military by pressing to take the investigation and prosecution of soldiers who engage in sex crimes away from the normal, failed chain of command process.

He ranted about how these “harpies”—with Obama again—were like members of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge whose leader, the communist Pol Pot, to consolidate his power, during the 1970s and 80s, called for and oversaw the barbaric torture and extermination of at least two million of his fellow countrymen.

This was so over the top even for the likes of a Savage, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh that when I awoke I thought I must have been having a nightmare. So I did a little checking.

It appears that Weiner/Savage has been making these Khmer Rouge slanders for a number of years. It is one of his mantas when savaging Obama. (Pun intended.) As an example, here is a long except from WND, a raggy right-wing Website:

Any doubt Americans may have had that Barack Obama is a Marxist should be alleviated now after hearing his rhetoric in a speech in Virginia over the weekend, top talk-radio host Michael Savage told his listeners in July 2012. 

Asserting that it is governments and not individuals who create jobs, Obama told entrepreneurs Friday: “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” 

 “You didn’t get there on your own,” the president said. “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.” 

After playing the audio of Obama’s remarks, Savage offered a blunt assessment.“So there’s communism,” he said. “That’s Karl Marx Obama. That’s Hugo Chavez Obama. That’s Joseph Stalin Obama. This is a very dangerous man.” 

Savage, noting he has studied dictatorships, recalled that tyrannical regimes “begin with innocent remarks like this.”“This man is the most dangerous, most divisive, most evil – I’ll use the word evil – president in the history of America.” 

Savage acknowledged he was “stepping up” his own rhetoric, because the situation requires it, and no one else will. 

“Things don’t start the way they end,” he warned, drawing lessons from history. “They start with the most innocent remarks like this.” 

The elected Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, whose rhetoric originated with 19th century French anti-Semites, did not start with death camps but with relatively benign racial purity laws, and no one stopped him, Savage pointed out. 

“The rhetoric Obama is expressing is not his own rhetoric,” Savage said. ‘This is what is deeply embedded in the man’s brain stem. He has been inculcated with hatred for the American way from the cradle.” 

The Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Savage recalled, “was a mild mannered professor like Obama” who went to Paris, studied Marxism “and came back a flaming communist.” 

“It ended with a mountain of skulls,” Savage said, with some 2 million people slaughtered in Cambodia’s infamous “killing fields.” 

Pol Pot, instituting what he was taught at Paris universities, unleashed his Khmer Rouge on anyone with an education – the productive people of society. 

“What does this have to do with that nice man in the White House with such a nice wife and nice children?” Savage asked his “Savage Nation” audience. 

“It starts with rhetoric like this,” he said. “It unleashes the genie in the bottle. It justifies any acts of betrayal, any acts of hatred, any acts of sabotage against the successful.” 

He called Obama “the most hateful man who has ever plagued the White House.”

Thinking about Obama, the seven female senators, and the Khmer Rouge, I thought to see just who those seven senators are and what they had to say during the hearings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Two of the seven are Republicans—Kelly Ayotte (NH) and Deb Fischer (NE)—and they were just as openly critical, even outraged as their Democratic colleagues.

What’s more, three of the male GOP senators—Roy Blunt (MO), Saxby Chambliss (GA), and John McCain (AZ)—were just as upset about the resistance of the Joint Chiefs to take the problem seriously that they spoke about about it just as forcefully as their female counterparts.

Here is what Khmer Rouge member McCain had to say—

He told an anecdote about a woman he encountered whose daughter was thinking about volunteering for the Army. She asked McCain, in the light of all the reports about sex crimes in the armed forces, if he could offer his “unqualified support for her daughter’s choice.

With a heavy heart, this former air force hero and prisoner of war said, “I could not.”

A final word--Michael Savage never served in the military. Like Dick Cheney, he secured a series of student deferments.