Wednesday, February 24, 2016

What Goes Around...

It's been said that what goes around comes around, and proof of this has been seen lately in the statements by public figures. President Obama recently gave a news-conference lecture (everyone of his answers is a micro-speech) informing the great unwashed (me) that the Senate must do its due diligence as spelled out in the Constitution and take up his SCOTUS nominee immediately lest the nation be robbed of its democracy.

Problem: He was firmly for filibustering into oblivion the nomination of Samuel Alito to the bench when he (Obama) was in the Senate in 2006, not to mention his (Obama's) well-documented disdain for the Constitution in the first place. His disdain for the Congress is even greater as he has attempted to rule by executive order lately.

Problem: In 2009 when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, as mandated in the Illinois Constitution, appointed Illinois politician Roland Burris to take Obama's vacated Senate seat, Obama, Illinois Senator Durbin and Majority Leader Reid attempted to block Burris from the position (even physically locking him out of the Capitol). The Illinois Supreme Court turned them around and they ate humble pie but the contempt for Constitutional governance was obvious.

Durbin's most distinguishable uttering came a few years ago when he compared U.S. soldiers to Pol Pot's “killing field” operators in Cambodia, Stalin's Gulag thugs and Hitler's Nazi butchers. He tried to apologize “if” he offended anyone but he would have been better served to keep his fat mouth shut about it.

And then Pope Francis, a mere man who some Catholics think speaks for God, berated Trump over the “wall” policy, obviously not thinking about the sturdy wall surrounding the Vatican and the weirdly attired Swiss Guard—his own personal army—that keeps him protected better than the Secret Service does for the president. Trump called it disgrace...it was that but much more just plain hypocritical or dumb – your choice.

His remark was made stranger because not long after his installation and concerning homosexuality he said, “Who am I to judge,” knowing full well the church's stance. Yet, in his wall-statement he judged that Trump was a non-Christian, a frightful sort of judgment he now felt competent to make about another human being.

Perhaps the most bizarre of such statements came from Hillary Clinton recently in an interview with CBS's Scott Pelley during which he surprisingly asked if she ever lied. She answered that she tried to never lie, realized how weak that sounded and elaborated by saying she never lied and never would.

The whole world (and Pelley) knows that her answer was itself a humongous lie. Her lies ranging from the Benghazi Massacre all the way back to the non-existent Bosnian snipers she outran in 1996 are so well documented that they appear in great detail on the Internet to this day.

On a sillier note, Fox's Megyn Kelly comes to mind. She and her Fox cohorts had obviously conspired to settle Trump's hash in the first debate so with fangs bared Kelly attacked him out of the gate for being a woman-hater. He sort of laughed off such a ridiculous charge and didn't even show for the second Fox effort.

On her own program the other evening she confronted Kasich over a statement he made about an early campaign in which women were so on his side that they (gasp) even left the kitchen to work for him. Kelly let him know that 70% of women “work” and are not attached to anyone's kitchen...so there! Just as she helped Trump's campaign, she no doubt did Kasich a favor. Just like Hillary, she hadn't learned a thing.

Former state secretary Madeleine Albright should join Pope Francis in discussing the spiritual status of folks. In campaigning for Hillary she said, “There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.” She didn't mention liars, of course, and one can only guess at her judgment of the worst offenders—men.

Yeah...what goes around comes around.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark