Bush & Company

Not to political advantage for leading presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry that the president resolve the jobs crisis---both falsely claim job creation in their states of Massachusetts and Texas---it's critical for President Obama, not to be beaten at the polls by any unfit Republican deceiver.

Mitt Romney, apparently having no firm convictions, bragging he's a job creator, does believe in seemingly rescuing companies, then firing their employees to gain huge profits for himself as the companies fall into bankruptcy. Rick Perry, with his dangerously opinionated policies, takes credit for jobs the Obama stimulus---which he villifies---has created, government jobs, low paying, often temporary. Cheap labor and feeble regulation account for many out-of-state jobs brought into Texas.

President Obama's shrewdly plotted push for jobs must win him reelection for the sake of a nation that has over the past decade dropped alarmingly in productivity, public safety, economic equity and over all, national honor. Mr. Obama does not fake his seldom acknowledged, but considerable, achievements.

Mitt and Rick are at their core
Empty suits and little more;l
Nonetheless, these two pretenders
Are for president top contenders.

Touting their uniqueness, yet
Their alikeness has been set
By their claims to be job makers---
In this context, both are fakers.

No way either can make good
On his pledge is understood.
D C bound, he doesn't care---
That won't matter once he's there.

In a special election, September 13, 2011, Democrat Anthony Weiner's seat in the US House of Representatives, Queens/Brooklyn district nine, was won by the first Republican in 88 years, a special election so different in outcome from that on May 24 in upstate New York when Erie County clerk Kathy Hochul won the vacant Democratic seat. New Congressman Bob Turner's apparent qualification is that he created both the Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Springer TV shows.

A barometer of the gathering disgust with not only incumbents in general, but Democats, because they are the president's party, Mr. Obama must continue vigorously pressing his cause to the people. His visit to the deteriorating Brent Spence bridge connecting Senator Mitch McConnell's Kentucky to House Speaker John Boehner's Ohio was a brilliant deliberate maneuver to show up the GOP leaders to their constituents.

Fault for the unalleviated gridlock on presidential proposals lies with President Obama's lagging use of his rightful powers---a perhaps calculated tradition among Democratic leaders---, an obdurate and pitiless Republican Congress and a myopic, impatient electorate determined to punish their president.

Mr. President, are you back,
Finally on a better tack
With your jobs bill right on track?
Have you learned it's all about

Using presidential clout
To defeat your foulest foes,
So that everybody knows
They're a bunch of so-and-sos?

That's how you won't get the sack,
Even if it's by a nose. . .

IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
Dick Cheney (with Liz Cheney)
Simon & Schuster (Threshold Editions)
527 pages of text

The author is living up to his reputation full force. The imperious, boastful, hawkish and now disloyal vice president is back.

His book's often humanizing and touching personal photographs cause one to wonder how this family man and doting grandpa of seven adorable grandchildren could be so oblivious to the blunt termination of so many other adorable grandchildren and their grandpas---besides Americans and allies, countless Iraquis and Afghanistanis have been slaughtered---as a consequence of his obdurate and merciless policies.

Even as his own party, his colleagues and closest associates are loudly complaining that his written words are words of betrayal, he continues to see himself as a solitary leader in the company of cowards.

George W. Bush's vice president makes no apologies, not for pushing the president into invading Iraq, not to Scooter Libby, not to Valerie Plame, not to Colin Powell or Condi Rice for what he wrote in his memoir or his patronizing of George W. Bush, who finally resisted his mentor's most extreme hawkishness, nor for the needlessly torchered and the dead. Nor does he apologize in his book. His single regret appears to be not pushing harder for the bombing of Syria's reactor in 2007. He discouraged the White House's impulse to apologize for the infamous "sixteen words."
"The sixteen words were true," he insists. Of remaining firm on his position of attacking Iraq, David Letterman quipped, "He would still invade the wrong country."

Unwilling to credit the current administration for the sensational conclusion to the search for Osama, he states, "I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation's intelligence community and our special operations forces were able. . . to find and kill bin Laden." This, despite his president's televised statement that he wasn't really concerned anymore about the master planner of 9/11.

All in all, Dick Cheney is proud of his record as vice president and seems rhapsodic over the prospect of his book's impact. "There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington," he brags.

As his mentor, he made the president the fall guy for decisions he, the so-called "eminence grise," actually made, although Mr. Cheney probably doesn't see it that way.

It's a bipartisan failure that this all-powerful former vice president is not to be tried and imprisoned for his major role in the Iraq invasion, the use of torture (which he paraphrases "tough interrogation") or spying on America's emails and phone calls and will bear no official stigma, rather be treated as a celebrity and former statesman, the author of an impressive volume depicting a weighty slice of American history. Poetic justice may determine how he's regarded.

Rick Perry is an outrage. How much of his political and religious histrionics does he believe? How much to persuade his credulous and ever-increasing audience?

Many Texans are familiar with his radical disdain for entitlements and notably, federal healthcare, his fallacious braggadocio as a job creator, his hypocritical use of government funding; know what he really is through bitter experience; others have yet to find out, while the favored few benefit from his corrupt and unethical policies.

Executions in his state outnumber, by far, those in any other state and even ones implemented by Governor George W. Bush before him.

Comparisons of Perry with the former governor-turned-president are rampant---cronysism, conflicts of interest and brazen favoritism toward the highly privileged figure as particular similarities.

Yet even as the latter made President George H. W. Bush appear brilliant and near saintly, Governor Perry makes the much-maligned son seem more than acceptable.

Governor Perry has no shame
When he wrongly places blame,
When he proves he lacks a heart;
While his Texas counterpart---

Many think that they're the same---
Never, never, ever made
Any threats against the head
Of the mighty US Fed

Nor so often prayed to God,
Like Rick's usual charade,
Making all those pious pleas,
Patently his base to please.

Could be it's the governor's aim---
Otherwise, it's very odd
That he's doing all one should
To make W look so good!