They say bad things come in threes. Last week, devastation swept over much of Japan, Libya descended into civil war and the Middle East seemed poised to resume its traditional role as the world’s biggest unlearned history lesson. While mankind hasn’t fully mastered the science of reliable earthquake prediction, we have a pretty good handle on recording our own history. Too bad we rarely craft good policy based on it.
Here at home, three political tragedies caught my critical eye this past week. Wisconsin government workers were stripped of their collective bargaining rights in an outrageous but clever procedural coup that caught everyone off guard. Republican Governor and righty lap dog Scott Walker – after handing big corporations huge tax breaks – made up the budget gap with pay cuts to middle class state workers. Catching no one off-guard, conservatives trotted out not one, but two big-name retreads, showing environmentalists once and for all, they do indeed recycle.
Back for another flop on the national stage, former House Speaker and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recorded an interview on the Christian Broadcast Network during which he justified his extramarital affairs laying their cause on his fervent patriotism. It seems Newt, who dumped one wife in her hospital bed as she recovered from uterine cancer to marry a staffer, whom he went on to dump as she suffered from lymphoma, was so passionately in love with his country, that he had to have sex with many of its women.
Newt (a slimy reptile, right?) is a fierce opponent of marriage equality. With a lesbian sister, he certainly can’t claim unfamiliarity and with three marriages under his belt, he’s no poster-boy for the whole until-death-do-us-part thing. So what’s he doing running as a social conservative?
Just two things. He is raising money that he will never spend on a presidential campaign and he is waging a war on LGBT America. Is he still that mad at his sister for outing her big brother as an epic hypocrite?
Number three in our local trilogy of tragedies is the attempted rehabilitation of Paul Wolfowitz – the comb-licking, Bush-era, neocon co-creator of “Quagmire Afghanistan” and his other long-running hit “Let’s Get Saddam!”
His next great idea: A U.S. run no-fly zone over Libya. Sounds innocuous enough, right? Wrong. A no-fly zone is not a time-out handed down by mom. It requires destruction of the Libyan air force and army so a multinational peacekeeping effort doesn’t get the hell shot out of it. The working name of Wolfowitz’ new play? “Moammar, Get a Car … ’Cuz You Can’t Fly No More!”
Of course, for any action against Libya, we’d need some ground troops. Any one up for a third war in a large, unruly Muslim country where we don’t have enough military intelligence to know whether the dude we toss is any better than his replacement? Wolfowitz is. How does a guy like Wolfie even get interviewed?
Given our recent history right here at home with the autocratic perversion of civil, human and workers’ rights, what possible standing do we have in the world to be any kind of moral authority? If the likes of Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz and Scott Walker occupy the American center stage, well, who’s gonna come and save us?
Milking it downtown
ARG’s Catherine Carmody has her incredible downtown home on the market. In the historic Carnation Milk addition of Icon, the duplex-style tour-de-force has more than 1,900 square feet of ultra-chic, exotic living space and 1,100 square feet of private terrace overlooking San Diego’s new Central Library. Offered at $1,175,000. For more information: catherine.carmody@argsd.com.
Jim Abbott is the President/Managing Broker of ARG Abbott Realty Group DRE LIC 1843472. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Nat’l. Assn of Gay and Lesbian Real Estate Professionals. He is a former board member at EQCA, SDAR, CAR and a past Library Commissioner for the City of San Diego. He can be reached at info@argsd.com or at his downtown office where his adult children pretend to let him run the company.
