Tag: Marco Rubio

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Post-Super Tuesday Thoughts

As longtime Flyer readers know, we don’t endorse candidates at election time, and didn’t on the occasion of this week’s presidential primary in Tennessee. But we do have some opinions. By now Super Tuesday is over, you’ve already voted, and we invite you to join us for a little bit of post-election armchair-quarterbacking:

On the Republican side, is there an alternative to Donald Trump?

There are things we find attractive about Ohio Governor John Kasich, who seems unique among the GOP contenders in that he appears to be both an experienced administrator and a pragmatic centrist, not a trash talker, a negativist, or a partisan demagogue. But maybe the punditocracy has it right: Only the Mambo Brothers, right-wing Senator Ted Cruz or former Tea Party darling and now ad hoc establishmentarian Senator Marco Rubio are serious alternatives to Trump.

The trouble with Trump, when you get down to it, is that he has no fixed principles. Like a hypocritical preacher, he can preach the world round or he can preach it flat. He can be free-trade or protectionist, pro-choice or pro-life, “liberal” or “conservative.” In one campaign, he can rebuke Mitt Romney for advocating self-deportation of illegal immigrants; in another campaign, his own, he can advocate forced deportation on a massive scale. He is what you want him to be, and he wants everybody to want him to be something, namely, president of the United States. That, we hazard, is why he had so much trouble repudiating David Duke to Jake Tapper on CNN once he’d heard that Duke had endorsed him. He’d want the Miley Cyrus vote, too, if he thought he could get it.

Trump is all over the map. That said, we wonder if that gives Rubio and Cruz, who restrict themselves more or less to one side of the map, the reactionary one, any claim to superiority over Trump. The Donald tries to go along to get along. He will, for example, give lip service to the GOP shibboleth that “Obamacare” should be abolished, but he hints that he might replace it with something amorphous that sounds like universal health care. There is no such ambivalence on the part of Rubio and Cruz; they would insist on a full return to the Darwinian system of health-to-the-highest-bidder medical rationing.

And on the Democratic side, is there any alternative to Hillary Clinton? 

We find much to admire in Secretary Clinton. She is strong, determined, and resourceful (all adjectives that she earned all over again in her redoubtable 11-hour standoff of a GOP lynching party at last fall’s Benghazi hearing). A little too calculating sometimes, and almost clam-like in her self-containment, but she’s smart and vetted, and her heart is in the right place — or near it — on numerous humanitarian and social issues. 

In fact, she seems right on so many things that we find it frustrating that she can’t be as simple and direct and, as they say, proactive on the issue of economic inequality as Bernie Sanders can. And because he can, frankly, we’d just as soon the Democratic contest went on long enough for the right kind of osmosis to occur between her point of view and his. Regardless of which one wins.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Trump Day in Millington

The approach to the Millington Jetport Hangar, where Donald Trump was to speak on Saturday evening, was a long, slow crawl for miles of automobiles bumper-to-bumper. It had the look of Woodstock to it, and, at 5:45 p.m., the car queues were being diverted away from the main approaches by uniformed local officers of various kinds and onto a back road that emptied directly onto the tarmac. From there it was a not-too-longish trek by foot through a gated area where peddlers a-plenty were selling Trump paraphernalia and finally, through metal-processing points into the hangar.

Uncharacteristically for the presidential campaigns in this election year (and unlike Trump’s once or twice in New Hampshire when the snows fell hard), this event conformed fairly closely to the advance schedule. At roughly 6 p.m., the appointed time, Trump’s big private jet taxied up close to the massive hangar’s open area, where a speaking platform had been set up, and the huge crowd inside the hangar, easily numbering several thousand, let up a roar, simultaneous with the raising of a host of cell-phone cameras to capture the event.

There had been rumors that Trump would have a surprise guest, and, sure enough, down the ramp, along with Trump came New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the recent presidential-campaign dropout whose endorsement of Trump on Friday had somewhat offset that day’s other big news meme, his brutal tag-team mugging by opponents Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in Friday’s Republican debate in Houston, broadcast by CNN.

Even as Trump and his new bromance bud strode up to the speaking stand, the continually building roar gave sufficient proof that The Donald had lost no luster among these masses, a packed-in assembly of just-folks Americana, largely white to be sure, but otherwise running across various class, gender, and age lines, from cap-and-jeans blue-collarites to a generously sized section for people in wheel chairs to the likes of Steve Ehrhart, the dapper Liberty Bowl exec who pointed out that he had grown acquainted with Trump in New York, presumably in the course of some deal that must have redounded to the benefit of both.

Christie spoke first, issuing some preliminary blasts at Rubio and Cruz and making it clear to the crowd that his endorsement of Trump was something more than that, it was an enlistment in the same cause that had attracted the thousands of attendees.

And then there was Trump. It was the usual philippic, mixing boasts, such as a claim that “every poll” had shown that he had won “every debate” with his rivals with familiar insults of those rivals, especially of “little Marco” — depicted by Trump as a quivering, sweaty-wet about-ready-to-pass-out “choke artist” whom he had spotted overtly leaguing with Cruz in a conspiratorial handshake before Thursday’s debate — and a distancing of himself from the rest of the field, too, indeed from the whole of the GOP establishment, with a claim that he was ever “the nicest person” on any stage with any of them and proudly boasting that he was creating a new Republican Party, indeed a new American consensus, including Democrats and independents as well.

The crowd, which was plainly not the usual muster of political junkie-dom (though any number of local GOP regulars could be spotted here and there) was uproariously with him on all of this, chanting “Win! Win! Win!” along with Trump and delighting also in his disparaging of the ex-Mexican president Vincente Fox who had famously said on Fox News that Mexico would not pay for the “faw-king” wall Trump says he’ll build on the border. The crowd rejoiced at Trump’s mockery of Fox and his tut-tutting at the “f-bomb” usage, and it suddenly became possible to imagine this and future such crowds hailing threats against uppity nations, near and far, that might go beyond the employment of bricks and mortar and electric wire.

Not that Trump, who for the record is much more non-interventionist in a military sense than his fellow GOP contenders, sounded any violent note per se. Indeed, when, as often happens at one of his rallies, a protester began to chant against him from inside the hangar, he calmly directed the crowd to “get him out” but “don’t hurt him.” And so the crowd did, with its counter-chant morphing from “Trump! Trump! Trump!” to “Win! Win! Win!”And finally to “U.S.A.! U.S.A! U.S.A!”

Call it what else you will, but this is a movement.

Meanwhile, Rubio and Cruz, building on what they must have imagined to have been the great gains of the debate, were releasing their tax returns over the weekend in the apparent belief that they could shame Trump thereby and embarrass him in the eyes of the American electorate.

It was hard to imagine such a thought crossing the minds of those in these approving multitudes. In fact, it was absurd to think they would side with the battling Mambo Brothers or the IRS against their new idol — or hold him blameful for possibly gaming a system that has done them no favors.

Could Trump, as he had boasted, actually get away with shooting someone at high noon on Fifth Avenue? With these supporters, he might. Not with the law, but — to say it again — Trump is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it.

Finally, there was the after-speech rope line, with Trump spending serious person-to-person time with each beseecher that handed him a cap or a poster or even an American flag to sign or smiling for the inevitable selfie. All the while there were desperate cries of “Mr. Trump! Mr. Trump!” from people trapped behind secondary rope lines further back, still hopeful, despite evidence to the contrary, that they, too, might get close enough to touch or be touched.

 

And then, finally, he was aboard the plane and gone, off on his quest to Make America Great Again, no doubt secure in his conviction that the minions he left behind in the Memphis area would go to the polls on Super Tuesday, just three days away, and do the right thing by him.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Cohen Touts Hillary at Opening of Local Campaign HQ

CREDIT: JB

JB

Cohen at Clinton HQ opening. Note that the cardboard cut-out of Hillary (far right, back) appears to be smiling at the congressman’s words of support.

If Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush goes looking for some kind of satisfaction this weekend, he may have to settle for a backhanded compliment from 9th District Democratic congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis.

Addressing Hillary Clinton supporters at the formal opening of local Clinton-for-President headquarters on Poplar Avenue Thursday night, Cohen gave a serious of harsh reviews of other GOP field presidential contenders (Example: “Marco Rubio, he’s a Barbie doll. They tell him what to say, and he smiles.”)

Then, by way of acknowledging that Bush, whose polling numbers have been consistently low, could be experiencing his last stand in this weekend’s Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, Cohen said, “It’s unfortunate that probably their best candidate is Jeb Bush.”

“Best of a bad lot” was roughly the connotation had in mind. In making the case for Clinton apropos the advent of early voting for the March 1 “Super Tuesday” primary in Tennessee and numerous other states, Cohen scourged the GOP presidential field in general as being threats to “women’s rights, voting rights, union rights, everything that has to with the fiber of the middle class , and the things we’ve fought for.”

The congressman was much kinder toward Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Noting that Sanders, whose Memphis supporters have also opened a local office on Poplar, a short distance away, is making a race of it in the primaries, Cohen said, “Bernie Sanders is my friend, I’ve worked with him on many issues.”

He said that he and Sanders have co-sponsored a number of bills and made numerous joint appearances for various causes, but that, in most of those cases, “we haven’t been successful, because we see things in a big way,” and, given the realities in Congress, most of those things “are not going to happen.”

“Don’t say anything bad about Bernie Sanders,” Cohen cautioned the 75 or so Clinton supporters crowded into the office’s front room. “We want all those Sanders people to work with us, come the fall.”

Cohen began his remarks with the good tidings of an endorsement of candidate Clinton from U.S. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, an African-American luminary and assistant Democratic leader in the House of Representatives.

The opening of the local Sanders office took place last Saturday and drew more than 100 people, many of them in the “millennial” age group. Matt Kuhn of the Sanders campaign had addressed that group.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Donald Trump’s No Pussy: Jackson Baker in New Hampshire

CREDIT: JB

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE — Give this to Donald J. Trump: Whatever his ultimate fate as a candidate for president of the United States, he can be credited with expanding the boundaries of what is publicly sayable by someone seeking that high office.

The Manhattan-bred billionaire’s previous contribution to the political vocabulary was his use some weeks ago of the participle “schlonged” to describe the defeat administered by Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton in their contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

JB

That piece of Yiddish vernacular — long familiar to anyone who, like Trump, grew up in the environs of New York and now equally well known to the nation at large — denotes an activity of the male genital organ, of course. It was inevitable that — fair and balanced as The Donald strives to be, despite his quarrel with Fox News, the appropriators of that term — he would eventually do equal duty by the female anatomy.

And now he has — appropriately enough, at the, um, climax of his last major address of the New Hampshire presidential-primary season, before a huge audience of media and supporters in the cavernous Verizon Wireless Arena of the state’s capital.

For anyone who has not yet seen a video clip of that henceforth-to-be-memorial moment, here’s a brief transcript of what Trump had to say as his stream-of-consciousness speech moved him to recall being chided by Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush about his “tone,” which reminded him of a moment of reticence on rival Ted Cruz’s part during this past week’s Republican presidential debate.

TRUMP: “They asked Ted Cruz a serious question: ‘What do you think about waterboarding, and, I said, Okay, honestly, I thought he would say, ‘Absolutely.’ And he didn’t. He said, ‘Well …’ You know he was concerned about the answer because some people …”
Distracted by a woman supporter in one of the front rows, Trump interrupted himself. Pointing to the woman, he said, “She just said a terrible thing. You know what she said? Shout it out, because I don’t want to say …”
WOMAN: “He’s a pussy!”
TRUMP (chuckling): “OK. You’re not allowed to say … and I never expect to hear that from you again. She said … (mock scolding )… I never expect to hear that from you again…” (crowd now chuckling along with him) :She said, ‘He’s a pussy!’”

What ensued from the crowd, not all of whom had heard the interloper distinctly but all of whom now heard Trump loud and clear, was first shock, then awe, then delight, then pandemonium and chants of “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!”” It was Donald Trump’s latest Gettysburg moment in his campaign to Make America Great Again.

Granted, Trump was only repeating what his supporter had said, and he went through a tongue-in-cheek moment of propitiating potential critics with a mock “reprimand,” but when he playfully asked, “Can she stay?” and the crowd bellowed its approval, he smiled broadly in satisfaction.

So, okay, the battle lines are now clear on an issue, perhaps the defining one, of Trump’s campaign — that of political correctness. Oh, go ahead and heap some other adjectives on: social correctness. verbal correctness. philosophical correctness. What you will. The man is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it.

In a campaign based on the most broad-brush attitude imaginable toward political issues, it is Trump’s fundamental iconoclasm that stands out. Be it ethnic groups, war heroes, disabled persons, gender equities, or linguistic norms, Trump is simply dismissive of all protocols.

He had arrived late for Monday night’s address, marveling at the sight of thousands crammed into the Verizon arena on the night of what he, more or less accurately, had called a blizzard, one which, he said, had caused at least seven accidents outside. He boasted of his up-scale, successful friends and of what he, and they, along with his supportive hordes of ordinary folks, could do to change the country.

He had his wife Melania, a former pin-up model from Slovenia, say to the crowd, in her heavily accented voice, “We love you in New Hampshire. We together will make America great again.”

And then, at the close of his remarks, mindful again of the weather on this primary eve, “I want to finish up, because you’ve got a bad evening out there. You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last ’til tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!”

The crowd cheered.

Up until Saturday night’s debate, I had thought there was a fair chance of Trump’s being overtaken on the Republican side in New Hampshire by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who entered this last week of the primary on a roll after finishing third in the Iowa caucuses (won by right-wing poster boy Cruz) and coming close there to catching Trump for the silver.

But that was before Rubio and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did their impromptu version, at the weekend debate, of a well-known Washington Irving short story, the one in which schoolmaster Ichabod Crane has been dazzling everybody as a fine young dandy until village bully Brom Bones, played in this case by Chris Christie, runs him right off the reservation.

Maybe that’s overstated as a comparison to the verbal pummeling Christie, obviously desperate to keep his own diminishing hopes as a suitor alive, gave to Rubio on the score of the latter’s talking points, rote-sounding to the point of self-parody, but it was pretty brutal. A thought: Anybody who went to high school in New Jersey with Christie and fancied the same girl that he did was ipso facto risking a serious ass-kicking.

But there was a serious point to the mayhem, which Christie duly made. And that was that the GOP field’s three governors — Christie, John Kasich of Ohio, and Bush of Florida — were all seasoned in actual administration rather than in the kind of parliamentary fencing that both Rubio and Cruz were skillful at.

Up to now the gubernatorial types have been puffing hard trying to stay within hailing distance, not only of the two clever young senators, but also of such untutored originals as Trump and Dr. Ben Carson.

Kasich inevitably talks a good civics-class game in public, and, after attending a Bush town hall on Sunday morning, I found myself more impressed with his comprehensiveness than I had expected to be. (He even acknowledged the reality of man-made climate change, albeit somewhat left-handedly, in response to an attendee’s question.)

As for the Democrats, they should really take heart that they have two candidates with significant followings, Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and that Thursday night’s debate between the two of them, beginning with such blazing dissonance, should end on a note of genuine respect.

When I saw Bernie at a rally at Great Bay Community College at Portsmouth on Sunday, it was precisely what I expected — an overflow crowd not only composed of today’s youth (lots of them) but one significantly leavened by graying ex-hippies from another time.

Pundits keep comparing Sanders to the charismatic Obama of 2008 or even, in his populist appeal, to Trump. But he is neither an inspiring New Thing like the former nor an exciting celebrity scofflaw like the latter. He is a bona fide revolutionary with a program that is authentically socialist — free college, state-supported medical care for everybody, guaranteed living wage for all workers, sticking it to the too-big-to-fail corporations.

A program of reform that attacks economic inequality directly and isn’t, like so much liberalism of the present, siphoned off into purely social issues, a la what Marcuse called repressive desublimation. (Although Bernie endorses the social issues, too.)

Still, Hillary, the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, has IOUs and a skill-set that shines through in extended give-and-take sessions like one I witnessed at New England College in Henniker and are built for the long haul. We’ll see.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

New Hampshire: Some Impressions

CREDIT: JB

SALEM, N.H. —

JB

A New Hampshire snowplow tries to make the world safe for democracy.

The Republicans

Yes, before it’s all over on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump will no doubt play a significant character role in my soon-to-be-published chronicle of the New Hampshire primary (scheduled for the Flyer issue of February 18), just as he has in so much national media coverage of the presidential-election season to date.

I plan to check out his last major rally in Manchester on Monday night, primary eve, and that should allow me to hazard some sort of serious eyewitness take on The Donald.
JB

New Jersy Governor Christie (aka Brom Bones) loomed menadingly over media onlookers (and Marco Rubio) at Saturday’s debate.

But for all the polls that still have Trump way ahead of his GOP rivals — by something like 20 points, at last reckoning — I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up suffering another major embarrassment like that which befell him in his second-place finish to Ted Cruz in Iowa last week.

So far I’ve only seen him in action in Saturday night’s debate of the remaining Republican contenders in Bedford, and, in all honesty, it was difficult to see Trump as a major figure in that event, or , for that matter, retrospectively over the course of the debates and cattle-call forums to date. More about that in the aforesaid February 18 issue.

Front-runner Trump may still be (at least in New Hampshire and possibly, tenuously elsewhere), but, up until Saturday night’s debate, I thought there was a fair chance of his being overtaken in New Hampshire by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who entered this last week of the primary on a roll, after finishing third in the Iowa caucuses and coming close there to catching Trump for the silver.
JB

Jeb Bush (like all the governors) is trying to make a point of his administrative know-how while he still can.

But that was before Rubio and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did their impromptu version, at the weekend debate, of a well-known Washington Irving short story, the one in which schoolmaster Ichabod Crane has been dazzling everybody as a fine young dandy until village bully Brom Bones, played in this case by Chris Christie, runs him right off the reservation.

Maybe that’s overstated as a comparison to the verbal pummeling Christie, obviously desperate to keep his own diminishing hopes as a suitor alive, gave to Rubio on the score of the latter’s talking points, rote-sounding to the point of self-parody, but it was pretty brutal. A thought: anybody who went to high school in New Jersey with Christie and fancied the same girl that he did was ipso facto risking a serious ass-kicking.

But there was a serious point to the mayhem, which Christie duly made. And that was that the GOP field’s three governors — Christie, John Kasich of Ohio, and Jeb Bush of Florida — were all seasoned in actual administration rather than in the kind of parliamentary fencing that both Rubio and Cruz were skillful at.
JB

Marco Rubio threw a Super Bowl Party for his voters.

It remains to be seen, in fact, whether New Hampshire becomes a turning point in how actual voters see the matter. Up to now the gubernatorial types have been puffing hard trying to stay within hailing distance, not only of the two 
clever young Senators, but also of such untutored originals as Trump and Dr.Ben Carson.

Kasich inevitably talks a good civics-class game in public, and, after attending a Bush town hall on Sunday morning, I found myself more impressed with his comprehensiveness than I had expected to be (hey, he even acknowledged the reality of man-made climate change, albeit somewhat left-handedly in response to an attendee’s question).

The guvs are running out of time, however, and should probably all step it up, a la Christie. It should be said that Bush’s SuperPac, Right to Rise, has been running expensive and vigorous ad campaigns against Rubio and anyone else perceived as standing between Bush and the voters he wants —but who so far haven’t wanted him.

The Democrats

Now, this one’s a real doozy — a bona fide one-on-one contest between a crafty and experienced pragmatist, Hillary Clinton, and an inspiring ideologue…nay, a revolutionary, Bernie Sanders. There is little  JB

In give-and-take sessions, Hillary Clinton can be persuasive, even charming.

doubt that New Hampshire is Bernie’s, but real (if somewhat diminishing) doubt that the energies he has tapped are enough to be a concern to Hillary elsewhere as the primary season wears on.

The Democrats should really take heart that they have two candidates with significant followings, and that Thursday night’s debate between the two of them, beginning with such blazing dissonance, should have ended on a note of genuine mutual respect.

When I saw Bernie at a rally at Great Bay Community College at Portsmouth on Sunday, it was precisely what I expected — an overflow crowd not only composed of today’s youth (lots of them) but one significantly leavened by graying ex-hippies from another time.

Pundits keep comparing Vermont Senator Sanders to the charismatic Obama of 2008 or even, in his populist appeal, to Trump. But he is neither an inspiring New Thing like the former nor an exciting celebrity scofflaw like the latter. He is a bona fide revolutionary with 
JB

Bernie and friends at Portsmouth: This about says it.

a program that is authentically Socialist — free college, state-supported medical care for everybody, guaranteed living wage for all workers, sticking it to the too-big-to-fail corporations.

A program of reform that attacks economic inequality directly and isn’t, like so much liberalism of the present, siphoned off into purely social issues, a la what Marcuse called repressive desublimation. (Although Bernie endorses the social issues, too.)

Still, Hillary’s IOUs and a skill-set that shines through in extended give-and-take sessions like one I witnessed at New England College in Henniker are built for the long haul. We’ll see.

The Weather Factor

JB

Ted Cruz drew big in a blizzard. Here he’s either being stroked or being hectored. (Both things happen to him.)

Like Iowans, the residents of New Hampshire understand their importance in the quadrennial screening process for would-be American presidents — a task which culminates in mid-winter — and they are downright intrepid in dealing with the elements.

Take the massive turn-out for right-wing poster boy Cruz in Salem on Friday night — a moonless sub-freezing night with iced-over streets and several feet of freshly fallen snow for the town’s fleet of snowplows to contend against. Parking at this and all other events was hard to come by.

Monday is everybody’s last shot at making good here, and some of the Republicans may not go any further. More about that later. And, btw, this visit to the New Hampshire primary is my seventh rodeo (1992 was my first.) It never gets old.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

2015: The Year That Was …

It was a heck of a year, 2015. In television, we saw the departure of NBC news anchor Brian Williams, whose fanciful anecdotes became the stuff of Internet memes. Then Jon Stewart left The Daily Show and David Letterman departed CBS after decades of stupid people tricks, leaving a void on late-night screens that their replacements will be hard-pressed to fill.

Early in the year, the long-awaited 50 Shades of Grey hit movie theaters and proved that kinky sex could be boring if you cast the right actors for the job. And “Uptown Funk” became the first Memphis-produced No. 1 song since “Disco Duck,” back in the 1970s. Hopefully, some enterprising Memphis musician will write “Uptown Duck” and keep the magic alive in 2016.

This was the year that Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner and posed for the cover of Vanity Fair, putting the T of LGBT into more conversations than ever before. Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court struck a blow for L, G, and B by ruling that gay marriage was legal in all 50 states — except for that one county in Kentucky where Kim Davis was the clerk. By refusing to issue gay marriage licenses, Davis got her 15 minutes of fame, and later, some well-deserved jail-time.

On the pervert front, Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, Josh Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting, and Bill “Dr. Huxtable” Cosby had their sexual deviances exposed and suffered varying consequences. Hopefully, we will not hear their names again, except in a court dossier.

The New England Patriots and Tom Brady survived “Deflategate” and won another Super Bowl; Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors jump-shot their way to the top of the NBA; and the Kansas City Royals won the World Series. Also, some team won the National Hockey League championship, but I’m too lazy to look it up, and you don’t care because you live in Memphis.

Unsurprisingly, we in the United States endured another year of mass shootings and mass death in churches, schools, malls, military bases, Planned Parenthood offices — and a California facility for the mentally disabled. The latter incident was perpetrated by Islamist terrorists and therefore became the incident that was the sole focus of right-wing media and the GOP candidates. They, of course, ignored the one common denominator of all the shootings, no matter the politics, religion, or mental state of the perpetrator: easy access to high-powered weapons. The NRA-owned GOP Congress then decided that even people on the terror no-fly list should continue to have access to guns. Because freedom.

Donald Trump gamed the presidential nomination process by dominating media coverage of the GOP race with his outrageous comments, each of which only seemed to increase his strength in the polls. As 2016 approaches, the GOP establishment is in near-panic mode, and will probably be forced to support Marco Rubio, the least wacky of the remaining viable candidates, and the only one they see having a chance to beat the Democratic nominee.

In Tennessee, the boneheads in Nashville played their usual tune, turning down federal money to expand Medicaid, and focusing on loosening gun laws, dumbing down our education system, fighting gay marriage, and taking on the horrific encroachment of Sharia law.

In Memphis, we elected a new mayor and got Bass Pro to fill the Pyramid with outdoorsy stuff. We learned to love Tiger football, and are struggling to learn how to live with mediocre basketball.

For more on the year just past — and predictions for the year ahead — in Memphis, check out the pages of this, our special year-end double issue.

The new year is upon us, bright and shiny and filled with hope. We at the Flyer are glad you’re with us after 26 years in Memphis, and we’re looking forward to another run around the calendar. Let’s get after it.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1399

Topless Bar

Have you heard about the topless bar in Harbor Town? Your PeskyFly loves nothing more than to share photographs of unusual holiday decorations, like this pair of scantily clad mannequin legs underneath a Mardi Gras bead-strewn tree. The festive legs first appeared during a Saturday night party, or so we’re told, and were used as a convenient spot to park adult beverages.

Neverending Marco

Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio took a stand for states’ rights to discriminate last week and invoked Elvis’ name in one of the more bizarre antigay analogies.

“If you want to change the definition of marriage, then you need to go to state legislatures and get them to change it,” said Rubio, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage. “Because states have always defined marriage. And that’s why some people get married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator. … Every state has different marriage laws.”

We’re pretty sure nobody is currently denying couples the right to be Elvis-married.

#Futurepoop

From hotel chains to supermarkets, Memphis is a city of important firsts. The Quick Fuel station at 4589 Old Lamar celebrated a grand-reopening last week, giving away free barbecue sandwiches, brats, and soda pop in Quick Fuel koozies. The new-and-improved gas stop is being described as America’s first fully automated convenience store with a robotic self-cleaning bathroom that locks and cleans itself from top to bottom after every use.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

That Sinkhole Feeling

If I had any hair, right now it would be dyed, fried, and flipped to the side, because if I had a brain left, it would feel that way. I blame it all on Arby’s, ISIS, guns, Jeb Bush, Marie Osmond, and, more than anyone or anything, IHOP.

Yes, IHOP. I should have known I was close to snapping when I heard the headline on the news. Well, I take that back. It was when I not only heard the headline on the news but also heard a headline that it was one of five trending news stories I “needed” to follow. It was something like, “IHOP Parking Lot Collapses in Mississippi.” And I just spit coffee all over myself laughing.

See? Snapping. I didn’t even care at that moment if anyone had been injured. It was just the thought of a bunch of people having just polished off their jelly-filled, bacon-covered, cheesy pancake with sprinkles towers and all leaving at once, putting such pressure on the parking lot that it just freaking caved in.

IHOP sinkhole

And look: I’m not making fun of people with some extra poundage, because I have plenty of that myself. But come on. An IHOP parking lot in Mississippi caving in? I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that’s a story anyone needs to follow, unless it’s a sign of a sinkhole epidemic, and what the hell can you do about that?

Sinkholes. There’s another one for my list of why my brain is dyed, fried, and flipped to the side. They just happen. Giant pieces of the earth just cave in with no warning. This is why I don’t drive on bridges or interstate highways. Well, there are more reasons for that malady, but you still never know when a sinkhole is going to open up and swallow everything around it.

Wouldn’t it be something if a sinkhole … ? I’m not sure what to write here. Does a sinkhole open up, or is the sinkhole what’s there after the ground gives way? See? You’re starting to worry, aren’t you? Anyway, what if a sinkhole does whatever it does during one of the Republican presidential debates? Not that I want any of those lovely people to get physically harmed in any way, which I really don’t. But what if they were all standing there at their microphones lined up like little ducks and whining about the big ol’ mean media, and all of a sudden they just vanished? Donald Trump’s hair (talked about dyed, fried, and flipped to the side!) might fly up in the air, Ben Carson would say the same thing happened to him at West Point, Marco Rubio could expense it, and no one would even notice Jeb Bush was gone.

Ack. Never mind. They are too easy a target. They just need to go away and have their debates in private where they can just answer each other’s questions. It’s embarrassing.

So I am really snapping. I’m trying my best to laugh to keep from crying right now. I’m serious. It’s kind of hard to laugh, though (other than about IHOP’s sinkhole), if you watch the news with any regularity. In about a five-minute span the other day, there were stories about American soldiers being gunned down in Jordan, a judge in Austin, Texas, being gunned down in her driveway, and in a small town in Louisiana two off-duty police officers allegedly shot a 6-year-old child five times while he was in his father’s pickup truck, and killed him. A 6-year-old child. Let me repeat that, a 6-year-old child. Shot five times.

During the same five-minute span, there was also a news teaser about an upcoming story designed to teach people how to correctly kill another person if that person invades your home. There was a video of a woman who was seemingly having a calm conversation with a man in the Middle East, and, right in the middle of it, she pulled out a huge knife and lunged at him and stabbed him. Is this what we’ve come to? Is this IT?

I try not to get too philosophical because it hurts what’s left of my brain too much, but I’m about halfway convinced that this world is on its last legs. I don’t believe in all that stuff about heaven and hell and the second coming and floods and turning into pillars of salt, but I am really starting to wonder if we are going to just self-destruct.

Okay. Enough of that. It was hard enough to get out of bed after all that, and the last thing I need, personally, is to fixate on it. I tend to fixate on things such as how frightened I am of Marie Osmond or how insane I’m going to end up if I see one more Arby’s “We have the meats” commercial, or how, after all these centuries, the Middle East is still such a hotbed of violence. I could fixate on those things all day and never get an answer. I think I’ll just go to IHOP and sit around in the parking lot. Maybe I’ll drop in for some pancakes.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Candy at the RNC

The Republican National Committee (RNC) met in Memphis last week. Committee members heard talking-point speeches from GOP presidential aspirants Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and an address from Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam.

More important, as Jackson Baker reported on our website — and expounds upon in this week’s paper — there were some significant moves made by the RNC’s rules committee. At the top of the list was a decision, approved by the membership, to “take control” of the GOP’s presidential primary debates by creating a committee to sanction a list of “approved” presidential-candidate debates. Any GOP presidential candidate who participated in an unsanctioned debate would be prohibited from taking part in any further sanctioned debates.

“All details of the sanctioned debates,” Baker reported, “would be overseen by the 13-member RNC committee — the rules, the questions, the choice of moderators, the length of answer time permitted to the candidate … everything and anything, in short.” Five of those members would be appointed by the RNC chairman.

Control, indeed.

The stated rationale for this decision was that “93 percent” of the media are hostile to the GOP. As one RNC member said: “Somebody has to say no to Candy Crowley.” Aside from the fact that I suspect many, many people have said no to Candy Crowley, this is subterfuge — creating a “hostile media” strawman to justify limiting the candidates’ exposure and making it tougher for fringe candidates to play by the RNC rules.

An Indiana University study reports that 7 percent of journalists (of all stripes) are registered Republicans, hence, I suppose, the 93 percent “hostile” media justification used by the RNC. The study further reports that 28 percent of the media are Democrats, 50 percent have no party affiliation, and 14 percent are “other.”

It’s clear the real reason for this move is that the Republicans don’t really want debates; they want showcases that create friendly sound-bites, and they want to remove the possibility of candidates having to face tough questions and maybe saying something stupid. (Rick Perry, come back. All is forgiven!)

Which raises the question: Who exactly is going to televise these “sanctioned” debates? Fox News might go along with such provisos, since most of their on-air personalities would be more than happy to toss underhand softballs at the GOP candidates. But I can’t believe any other legitimate TV network would accept such an arrangement.

But maybe that’s the point, after all. It’s like the RNC version of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS): When it comes to the “national championship,” the RNC, like the BCS, wants to keep the little guys from having a shot.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com