Kevin McCarthy, Gen X Elder

Kevin McCarthy, who is the same age as I am and thus represents the pinnacle of Generation X elder wisdom, is like some of those annoying kids I knew in high school back in the early eighties.  You know the sort - the kids who walked around like the Fonz, in their Journey T-shirts, and thought they were so cool because they bought Escape the first week it came out and quoted numerous lines from Fast Times at Ridgemont High when in fact they were as lame as f**k! 

McCarthy, who is so disrespected by Nancy Pelosi that she wouldn't even refer to him by his name, has announced he is leaving the House of Representatives at the end of the year.  He talked about his major accomplishments as Speaker, both of which died in the Senate, and he added, "No matter the odds, or personal cost, we did the right thing. That may seem out of fashion in Washington these days, but delivering results for the American people is still celebrated across the country."

"Kevin," I kept thinking, "I beg you to stop!" 

Charlie Sheen.  Brooke Shields.  Jesse Jackson, Jr.  And Kevin McCarthy.  Gosh darn it, are these the best elders my generation can offer?

I am also confident that McCarthy considers Loverboy's Get Lucky to be one of the greatest albums of all time.

McCarthy, the shortest-serving and least powerful Speaker in history, isn't just lame as f**k, he's lamer than f**k.  After selling his soul to Donald Trump and getting nothing in return, he promises to campaign vigorously for Trump and "help" continue to build the Republican Party.  

McCarthy is going out with a smile on his face, proud of everything he has not accomplished.  But as with the Cheshire Cat, the more he smiles, the more you realize there's nothing there. 

In his farewell address to the House, McCarthy said that if doing the right thing costs you your career you should do it anyway.  I have a perfect title for a book McCarthy could write containing such pearls of wisdom . . . 

. . . but it's already been taken.

Marty's Out

Labor Secretary and former Boston Mayor Martin "Marty" Walsh is quitting his Cabinet post to become president of the National Hockey League Players' Association.  Nice work if you can get it.

As a longtime union member himself, Walsh brought a renewed commitment to having the Labor Department serve the working class and giving them a better deal in the workforce.  President Biden needs another Labor Secretary with that same commitment toward the lunch-pail crowd.  And no person other than Walsh is more qualified to work with labor issues as head of the U.S. Labor Department than Tim Ryan.

"Hold it, Steve," you're saying, "you said recently on this blog that, as a supporter of natural gas as a phiny bridge to clean energy, Tim Ryan is a fraud!"  I take that back.  Tim Ryan is a basically decent man who knows the working class because he comes from it and he would make a fine Labor Secretary in Marty Walsh's stead.  I still think he's all wrong on natural gas as a "bridge" to clean energy.  The idea sounds more ridiculous than clean coal.  But this is the Labor Department, not the Environmental Protection Agency, and while Tim Ryan may be totally wrong for a job regulating greenhouse gases or limiting fossil-fuel extraction, he's perfectly right for handling labor and workforce issues.   

Let's get Tim out of lobbying for natural gas and put him in a position he's a natural for.  Tim Ryan for Labor Secretary!

The Art of Quitting

I continue to withdraw from life as I used to know it.  I just did something I thought I'd never do; I decided to stop campaigning for high-speed rail to be established in the United States.  It became apparent that, even with an Amtrak advocate like Joe Biden in the White House, the political and societal conditions that exist today make it impossible to bring bullet trains to America.  The infrastructure bill passed and signed into law will help Amtrak upgrade its service and modernize its equipment, but it will not bring our passenger rail into the twenty-first century.  We will have to be satisfied with Amtrak being upgraded to the late 1960s.  So I withdrew my high-speed rail petition from MoveOn.org after getting only 22 signatures in seven years . . . and I withdrew from MoveOn.org. 

And I quit MoveOn.org because I'm giving up on all political causes.  As far as I'm concerned, it's over.  Let the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade.  Let Louis DeJoy remain Postmaster General.  Let school boards ban books.  I don't care any more.  I got sick and tired of all these e-mails from groups asking me to sign a petition for this or writing my senator for that or asking for donations (which I never gave anyway) . . . so I unsubscribed from the e-mail lists of all of the liberal groups and online left-leaning publications that sent them to me.  Especially the snarky Daily Kos.  And after all the ridicule I got for supporting the presidential campaign of Martin O'Malley - who also got a lot of ridicule - why would I want to join another presidential campaign? (Technically, though, I never joined the O'Malley campaign because it didn't make it past Iowa.) 

And this great resignation isn't limited to politics.  I have been a book reviewer both for IndieReader.com and on this blog.  When I lost touch with my editor at IndieReader over the fall and the holidays, I kept putting off sending an e-mail to her until I suddenly realized I didn't have the desire to write book reviews anymore.  Oh, I may go back to that eventually.  But for now, I've had enough.  

I've even given up giving up.  Raised Catholic (but never confirmed), I faithfully gave up something every Lent even after I stopped going to church.  During the 2020 Lenten season, I gave up drinking hot chocolate as my sacrifice but resumed drinking it after three or four weeks because the pandemic made me give up . . . everything else.  I haven't observed Lent since.      

This quitting spree is nothing new for me.  In fact, I've thrown in the towel so many times in my life, I've made an art of it.  Particulars:

I took guitar lessons when I was a teenager. I never could master it. I quit.

I graduated from college and sought to go to graduate school because my parents wanted me to, but I had to pay my own way. After vacillating between journalism and communications, being unable to afford the journalism school of my choice and getting rejected by the communications school of my choice, I decided that I didn't want to go to graduate school any more. I never did want to, really.  I quit.  Years after that, I signed up for a graduate communications course at Fairleigh Dickinson University but withdrew before it even started.

I signed up for a journalism course at Montclair State. After one class, I was unimpressed. I quit.

I signed up for computer programming school at the Chubb Institute and lasted only three classes. I quit. And the school turned out to be a rip-off anyway.

I looked for a career-oriented job out of college even while looking into graduate school. I tried looking at jobs in publishing, broadcasting, and journalism, and I found nothing.  I quit.

I was hoping that a career-oriented job would help me strike out on my own. After a couple of years, it became apparent that that was not going to happen, so I quit.

After getting laid off from my permanent full-time medical insurance job, I tried other permanent full-time jobs that didn't work out. When I got laid off from my last permanent full-time job - after half a day of employment (long story), I stopped looking for a permanent full-time job. I quit.

I once thought I wanted a girlfriend. I never had a high school sweetheart. I never had a college sweetheart. I never found a girl or woman I asked out who wasn't already taken. I fell in love twice, and neither woman loved me back. Going to see a ladyfriend of mine, I drove my car through a flash-flooded road from a severe rainstorm that tore out the plastic undershield of my car. I quit looking for a girlfriend.

I tried writing on spec articles by specializing in profile articles on interesting women, but after getting only a few of them published, going nowhere with others, and never getting paid for them - plus a bad experience with one woman I approached - I quit.

I was a contributing writer for a local newspaper in Manhattan, but after one assignment didn't work out, I quit.

As previously noted, I made numerous attempts over twenty years to travel abroad - first with my mother, then alone - that didn't pan out. I had a chance to go to Paris to see a friend of mine there. Instead I got appendicitis, then when I looked again at the possibility of going to France, COVID hit. I held out hope during the pandemic. Now we have a pandemic plus a war. I quit.

I started seeing a woman and started going bowling again just before COVID hit. I might see this woman again soon - I might - but I have no plans or desire to go bowling again. I quit.

I wanted to say I quit Scouting, but that would be inaccurate.  I moved around a lot as a kid and missed the Bear Cub Scout and Webelos years. Boy Scout meetings were boring and I never paid attention to what was going on, but I did earn a stamp collecting merit badge - which I never received because I moved in with my father, who lived in a different state then, and he apparently couldn't be bothered to help me pick up Scouting where I left off. I never actually quit it, really. I just drifted away from it . . ..

Ahh, that's enough for one post. I quit.

Eric the Palm-Faced

Hours after the New Yorker, hardly a bastion of Trump-style conservatism, reported that one of Trump's greatest adversaries, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, was engaged in all sorts of forms of verbal and physical abuse against four former girlfriends, Schneiderman resigned in disgrace and humiliation.  Trump's minions are expressing their glee over Schneiderman's fall instead of engaging in the classy act of expressing sympathy or sorrow for the women involved because of the abuse committed against them.

And the abuse is brutal.  Schneiderman literally slapped them around, and tried to choke some of them in the process.  He even used racial epithets against one girlfriend, Tanya Selvaratnam, an author an actress of Sir Lankan descent. it seems he called her his slave.  Schneiderman professed his innocence in stepping down, saying that he was quitting so as not to distract the New York State Attorney General's office from the numerous cases it is pursuing - including a suit against the Federal Communications Commission for killing Net neutrality and protection of immigrants.  But get this - Schneiderman also handled a case against Harvey Weinstein and was a supporter of the Me Too movement.

Awkward!

Trump may have been handed is biggest gift yet, because there will now be a state of disarray as the the state of New York has no short-term direction in pursuing the many suits against Trump's administration - some of which would involve prosecuting's Trump aides under New York State law if Trump pardons them. The New York state legislature will select a new Attorney General by the end of the week to finish the remaining months of Schneiderman's term - unlike in New Jersey, where the state attorney general serves at the pleasure of the governor, New York chooses state attorneys general by popular election - but with the New York State Assembly under Democratic control and the New York State Senate under Republican control, a consensus candidate may not emerge so easily.  And whoever is chosen might end up being a lame duck.

And if Schneiderman's successor is someone who decides that he or she has no business going after Trump, states like New Jersey and California will lose a powerful ally in their own battles against the White House.

Even if Schneiderman's explanation of the charges were to be taken seriously, it's best that he quit.  He admitted that he was involved in questionable sexual behavior with his girlfriends (he's not married, having been divorced since 1996), but it was consensual sex in acts of role-playing.

Oh, my God, he's one of them!

As long as people like Schneiderman are allowed to serve in public office, the Democrats will remain the party of deviancy and hedonism in the eyes of Middle America.

The New Yorker article was co-written by Jane Mayer and - you guessed it - Ronan Farrow.

Goodbye, Gabby

It should have become apparent to anyone who realized just how badly wounded Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was in the January 2011 shooting in Tucson that she would eventually have to resign her seat. So it was no surprise when Giffords announced that would in fact quit the House of Representatives this week to concentrate on her ongoing recovery. She was able to put the announcement in her own words, literally - she made the announcement in a video release - so the woman who has been an inspiration to many has a very good chance of recovering fully. And she's vowed to remain active in politics regardless.

Alas, she won't be an inspiration to pass meaningful gun control legislation, which has a very good chance of getting defeated in Congress - if anyone has the gall to even bring it up. (Every time a horrendous shooting occurs in this country - which happens frequently enough to feel like an everyday occurrence - Chris Matthews asks the panelists on his Sunday broadcast show if gun control legislation has a chance of even getting considered, and his panelists respond with an imitation of Marcel Marceau in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie - "No!") This isn't so much a partisan condition as it is an American condition - a peculiarly and insufferably American love of firearms.

Am I suggesting that Americans are peculiar and insufferable? You can draw your own conclusion.

On the other hand . . .. Sarah Palin - one of the most peculiar and most insufferable Americans in recent memory - has seen her stature reduced a result of the Giffords shooting. In the 2010 midterm election campaign, Palin posted a map of Democratic House districts targeted by Republicans, depicting the districts with rifle crosshairs over them - one of them was Giffords' district. After the shooting, she gave such a mean-spirited defense of her actions in the wake of charges that she incited violence that her rising star dimmed quickly. So some taste survives here, enough to not only lessen Palin's visibility but to also eliminate the Minnesota Twins (Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann) from the Republican presidential nomination contest early.

The Big Ws

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has even more reason to feel like the cat that swallowed the canary, as the state Supreme Court has overruled Judge Maryann Sumi's decision barring implementation of the state's new anti-labor law. The law stripping collective bargaining rights from most public workers had been blocked from implementation by Judge Sumi on the grounds that adequate notice of a Wisconsin Assembly conference meeting to isolate the provisions of the law from a larger budget bill and make it separate legislation had not been given - thus violating the state's open meetings law. Peter Barca, the Assembly Minority Leader, had been present at that meeting, where he protested against the lack of adequate notice given - even as the Republicans present created the separate bill and walked out as if Barca wasn't there.

In a 4-3 decision, the Court ruled that enough adequate notice had been given of the hastily called meeting under the circumstances. The Court added that Sumi had overstepped her authority by having "usurped the legislative power which the Wisconsin Constitution grants exclusively to the legislature."

The ruling had been aimed not at the merits of the bill but at the way it had been drafted and passed. With the process now having been upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Walker can now look forward to . . . a challenge to the bill on the merits in federal court. This is probably going to a high court that rules for more than just one state.

Meanwhile, the coup de grace has just been delivered to Anthony Weiner. A nightclub dancer former pornographic priestess - oops, I mean actress, goo goo g'joob - named Ginger Lee has come forward and told the media that she and Weiner had corresponded after she wrote something commendatory of the New York congressman on her blog. Wow, that's astonishing! Exotic dancers write blogs?

Ginger Lee - not to be confused with Ginger Grant, who defeated Ginger Lee in the Miss Appomattox beauty pageant - said that Weiner connected with her online, and that she and Weiner exchanged e-mails between March and June 2011. Ms. Lee then said that Weiner told her to lie about it if she were asked by the media. She added for good measure that Weiner would direct the conversation to sexual matters but that she, professional exotic entertainer that she is, refused to reciprocate.

That did it. Weiner must have been dreading the inevitable moment of shame. I mean, of course, when his wife Huma Abedin got home from a State Department trip - she works for Hillary Clinton - and he had to confront her. But aside from that, he has to take another inevitable step. He is announcing his resignation.

Scott Walker can breathe a sigh of relief that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on the collective bargaining repeal law just before people were ready to pay attention to his state again, with the Weiner story about to fade away. But he'd better get used to Wisconsin workers literally making a federal case out of it.