For Whom the Bell Tolls

Sometimes Politics has to stand aside.  That happened this afternoon when we watched “John McCain For Whom The Bell Tolls” an  HBO Documentary.

The politics don’t matter, they really don’t.  The leadership does and the service does.  At the end of the day, and that is where McCain is now, that is what counts.  Character does count.

McCain admits over and over again that he made mistakes, that he is human, that he made errors in judgement; etc etc.  He was no saint, but he admitted it.

And he is dying of the same disease that took Ted Kennedy.

I remember the day after Kennedy died.  I was on the putting green at Gold Hills and one of my right wing Republican Friends said cruelly about Kennedy, “They shot the wrong Kennedy many years ago”.

Now there were two Kennedys who were shot dead, but the only one who wasn’t shot was Senator Ted Kennedy.

I told the perpetrator of hate what I thought of him and his lack of humanity and  reminded him that my wife had died of cancer and left.  I didn’t play golf that day.

I did, in my friend’s defense, receive a profuse apology for his stupid statement.  I would like to think he grew a little that day.

But partisan politics is why the statement was made.  And sometimes politics clouds our humanity and our feelings for one another. And politics is an means to the true end: the public interest.

Democracies are messy and clumsy in getting to the public interest.  Often they can be so cumbersome they never get there.  But the alternative, authoritarian fascism is so harmful to the public interest that it simply cannot be allowed.

We are in a very dark place right now.  President Trump has the knack of turning people against one another like no other politician save McCarthy in the 1950s.  And McCarthy did not have access to immediate media, social media and the rest.

And the country is groaning in agony of division and hate.  And the public interest is harder and harder to define.

  And McCain is dying in Arizona with the same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy.

And Ted Kennedy made mistakes; he was involved in a fatal car accident that killed a woman and led to the basic end of his political career.  And we all watched in sorrow as two brothers before him were buried in Arlington, victims of assassination.

I read the review of the HBO documentary about John McCain.  Several reviewers were unkind to the man even now in a political way.  It is as if making more political points even now on a man who is definitely down, who was an American hero by any stretch of the imagination, somehow what, makes you what, superior?

It makes you a spiteful ignorant fool.

Look, the WE  is more important than the ME.  McCain got that.  He fought in an unpopular war,  but for which he convinced  the government later in life, to recognize Vietnam as a country in spite of the politics.   He worked to recognize a country that had tortured him for years.

 He ran for President twice and supported yet another unpopular war, but came to make comments about the fact that it was unwarranted.  He admitted that he was human and made mistakes.

And  he lost  to the first African American elected President.  He famously did not condemn the Confederate Flag, doing what he admitted later was the wrong thing, he did the politically expedient thing; and it didn’t work.  But he apologized for it.  He apologized!  And he also famously took the mike from  deluded woman who claimed Obama was an “Arab” and commented that he was a good man and he would not stoop to that level to get elected; and he didn’t.

Trump stooped to that level with his Birther crap.

He was a hard right conservative in many things.  But that right was not racial, it was political and economic.  He truly believed  in personal liberty unfettered by government.

That of course in my political view is wrong, because again the WE  is more important than the WE.  I sometimes think John knows that in his bones as well.

And McCain agreed with me there, valuing friendship and bipartisan effort as “the regular order”.  The regular order is a government that works for the public good.

Finally, my memory of this American Hero will always be his walking to the podium to cast the deciding vote to destroy the law that was his biggest political rival’s accomplishment.  He could have voted yes and wiped out Obama’s Health Care Bill, the ACA….but he didn’t.

 He put his hand in the air and gave the thumbs down sign.  And that vote saved millions of people’s health care.  And he voted that way not because he agrees with government sponsored health care; he doesn’t.  He voted that way because the public interest was at odds with the proposal,  he knew it, and the power in the Senate had gone around the regular order to get something that would hurt a lot of people.

And all the politics be damned.  For McCain  the country counted first.

And I will stand and salute the man and his honor with that one McCain like demonstration, that one thumbs down movement was his high point.  And he voted that way because it was not in the “regular order”.

That, my fellow citizens in the We not the Me; the regular order is working together for the common good.

And Senator McCain did that more than the other, much more in his life for Whom the Bells Toll.

Your Dishwasher Is Killing Your Grandchildren!

Currently California, that ‘leads’ the United States in renewal electricity energy production, uses about 75  percent coal and natural gas to produce our electricity.  The rest comes from renewables.  A tiny fraction is from solar.

Solar is the least expensive and easiest renewable electricity source but has one big drawback...it is basically free because the sun’s energy is free.

Corporations can’t figure out how to ration it.  They can’t figure out how to turn a profit.

If you are a solar panel owner, you know your electric company moves heaven and earth to charge you for the problems your putting electricity back into the grid causes...leaving out that basically this is a ruse since power lines can run in two directions and the real costs were paid a long time ago.  But many California cities are their own power company, providing electricity to their customers and running the police departments with the revenue.

We have starved cities and counties to death with our Prop 13s and our tax cuts, blaming government for everything and approaching revenue like its killing our souls (the recent 12 cent gas tax that is desperately needed for highway repair and mass transit development).

But we continue as idiots ignoring the FACT that right now over 70% of our electricity is produced by sources that are running out fast.

And sources that can be used to power automobiles, trains and buses are going into your air conditioner!

But it will never run out right?

WRONG!

Put up the solar panels, insist on wind power and tell your idiot conservative friends to SHUT UP...when they complain about bird deaths that allegedly happened from wind power (sound diversion keeps the birds away).

The FACT is greedy and morally bankrupt cities and corporations are quietly fighting solar and wind rather than investing public dollars in them instead of fighting them.  Many  small cities (like Redding, ,CA) own vast areas of public land that could easily hold solar arrays but refuse to invest the money (our money by the way) in solar arrays.

What is wrong with this picture.  We are right now killing our grandchildren right now every time you run your dishwasher.

Trump is no Truman!

First of all Truman was no Trump.  Truman reigned in MacArthur  who stupidly was attempting to invade China.  Good ole Dugout Doug decided on his own that goading China into a war was a good idea in 1950, advancing toward the Chinese Korean border.  This also coordinated with the “lost China” crowd, Republicans who decided that the only way to stop the New Deal was to subvert it through criticisms of foreign policy.

Their constant call for a “get tough” and win back China disregarded the nationalism of the Chinese, was racist from the start, and almost got us into a land war in Asia (which we were trapped into with Vietnam).  

The reasons for this were simple, nothing else worked for the Republican Party that had not only caused the Great Depression but left the country totally unprepared for WWII.  

China warned us several times, then allowed our troops to advanced up the valleys toward China while the Chinese infantry took the high ground, causing one of the worst defeats in United States Army history.

The survivors of that stupidity were able to escape, preserving enough presence to fight the Korean War to a final stalemate that persists today.  Truman fired MacArthur who was scheming to run for President in 1952, as a Republican of course.  

The disaster that he led destroyed his political career.

And Truman had the fortitude and integrity to take a very unpopular stance which preserved the President as Commander in Chief.  MacArthur was a renegade and had to be stopped.  Truman fired him.

Truman also integrated the Armed Services, quite an accomplishment for a man from Missouri, a border state with strong connections to the KKK.

There is absolutely no comparison between Truman and Trump.

Truman was, for the time, a mainstream Democrat, a New Dealer who was selected by an ailing Roosevelt to continue his policies; which he did.  The country may have appeared to be tied fo the New Deal, but the REAL reason for Eisenhower’s election was the disaster of the the Korean War.

People were tired of war.  Many WWII vets had joined the reserves after the war, where a few years into an enlistment and found themselves back on the front lines; with growing families at home.

A long conflict was the LAST thing they would tolerate. 

That was why the Democrats lost in 1952, the same reason they lost in 1968; stuck in an unpopular and costly war.  

Truman was no populist...but he was a great President because he continued the policies of one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

Trump?  He is a shadow of a leader and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same article with Truman.