The shambles that the Republican Party has been making of itself so far in this century is personified in the curmudgeon that Senator John McCain has become during the Obama presidency. The statesman and military hero that he was before he lost the 2008 run for president has been overcast by an increasingly mean-spirited hatchet-man ready to chop away at any nominee facing Senate confirmation to join the White House team or the Supreme Court.

His performance threatening any consideration the president might give UN Ambassador Susan Rice as the next secretary of state was abysmal. It boomeranged because it showcased Rice’s star quality and eminent qualifications to lead American diplomacy, which she will continue to do leading the American delegation to the United Nations. His opposition served her well because it heightened her presence on the world stage.

His growing appetite for sour grapes has been still more heavily focused by his strident opposition to President Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon. Since  Hagel and McCain are both Republican members of the world’s most exclusive club — the United States Senate, past and present — the senior senator from Arizona is looking more and more like a very sore loser. Both are veterans of the Vietnam War, and if he is confirmed, Hagel would become the first secretary of defense to have served as a noncommissioned warrior.

McCain’s lack of civility in dealing with Rice became more glaring still in committee hearings on the Hagel confirmation. It’s a televised record that may be shown in history and political science classes for years to come, when teachers are giving lessons on the importance of civility and conciliation in the exercise of representative government and the paralysis of it when they are lacking.

The hostility with which McCain pounded his Republican and veteran brother could only leave McCain shrinking in stature, looking still larger as a sore loser. Worse still, it leaves this once-esteemed hero unable to grasp his self-inflicted fall from grace, a fall that leaves him on the wrong side of history.

His attack, which had the flavor of an old man kicking his neighbor’s dog, targeted a view that Hagel voiced during the Iraq War speaking against the mid-war troop surge and the folly of playing peacemaker among tribes whose ongoing war with each other was older than the Roman Empire. It was a war Americans saw little need for, and they liked even less when they learned Bush-Cheney had used false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Hussein’s hands as the excuse for staging it. They tarnished the high esteem Americans felt for General Powell when they sent him to the United Nations to trumpet those claims. Fortunately, the general, then the secretary of state, is being remembered as the one giant from the Bush-Cheney cabinet.

Sadly, as he turns increasingly hawkish in his vendetta against the incumbent who erased his dreams of the presidency — that he appears to think was owed him — McCain goes on shrinking as a hero and statesman. It appears too that his string of political setbacks now finds him thinking of them as “personal.” He  showed in the Hagel confirmation that his opposition was very personal. How can he be forgiven for his support of the grievous Iraq War and the needless troop surge when he goes on insisting that two wrongs make a right? Will history remember him not as hero but as the senator fond of believing two wrongs make it right?  That gallery of fame is already overflowing.

Frank Mensel — February 2013

As we follow the news on the George W. Bush Library taking shape at Southern Methodist University, it keeps reminding me that his tenure was the most destructive presidency the nation has endured. In my sense of history, it has seemed so destined from the start.

Always the spoiled and wayward son, he struck me as cavalier in his attitude, possibly seeing himself as a bit bigger than the office. Was there any office big enough for a man whose name slicked him through Yale and a Harvard MBA, while it also detoured him into the Texas Air Guard and out of Vietnam, and wasted the public investment in the pilot’s training that he failed to repay by active service?

Unelected by popular vote, he was settled in the White House by Republican sway over the Supreme Court, which blocked the recount of the Florida vote that could have decided the election fairly. If his unearned victory awakened any humility, it never showed. As if owed the office, he ruled more by impulse than reason.

His most haunting mistake was choosing equally wayward, saber-rattling Dick Cheney for vice president.  They ruled more by ego than by the duty declared in the oath of office. This shows consistently in decisions that continue to spread harm.

WAR: They were bent upon going to war in Iraq even before they took office. To crush the despotic tyrant Saddam Hussein would showcase the “shock and awe” of U.S. military might – never mind cost or other consequences. There was no preparation for the soaring budget deficits it made inevitable. The real “shock and awe” fell upon the taxpayers, picking up the tab for the large and prolonged army of occupation and the restoration of infrastructure and basic services, and piling up a long string of bloated contracts for Halliburton, the company Cheney headed before the election.

TAXES: They insisted on across-the-board tax cuts that no one was asking for, ignoring the certainty that war would devour the budget surpluses left by the second Clinton term and turn the budget red. The Reagan deficits, which more than doubled national debt, were historic coming from a Republican president whose party had always been devoted to fiscal responsibility. The Iraq War put GWB on course to more than double the debt again: a towering legacy of two-for-two for the up-side-down GOP.

HOUSING: The push for more homeownership that President Clinton started was grown by Bush-Cheney into a huge and fragile bubble that made a shambles of the economy when it burst. Job growth under Bush had been strongest in home construction, and it faded fast as mortgage banking went into a tailspin along with sales. Falling prices left a sea of homes worth less than their mortgage, and foreclosures soared as owners in droves abandoned their property to the banks. It was the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007, from which recovery continues to sputter under the evolving job markets  for which most jobless are unprepared.

CLASS WARFARE: The arrested growth of the middle class that began with the invasion of Washington by the Reagan crowd of neocons and their economic game of “trickle down” struck a pause in the Clinton years of workforce expansion and budget surpluses. But it soon quickened under GWB and his doubling down on Reaganomics. The middle class found itself  sandwiched between soaring wealth above and growing poverty below. The spread of earnings top to bottom had grown from a gap to a yawning chasm, with the middle class shrinking relatively in both size and pay, yet

bearing the heaviest responsibility for the unprecedented mountains of public and private debt that goes on growing. Bush-Cheney left office with poverty and joblessness gripping a far larger population than the number bearing those hardships in the Great Depression. They promised “compassionate conservatism,” but delivered neither. It will be interesting to see what the Bush Library does with this hollow promise.

Our mountainous debt stands as a cruel monument to the excesses that have been imposed on WeThePeople by the power grab of the neocons led by two Republican presidents, both of whom defaulted badly, and seemingly blindly, on the GOP’s historic devotion to fiscal responsibility. They turned the federal budget into an ever-flowing milk cow of corporate welfare. It’s an ironic turn of GOP history that Presidents Reagan and Bush II would distinguish themselves as the biggest spenders in the history of the office.

Just how much of this record will be portrayed honestly and accurately in the Bush II Library remains to be seen. SMU’s integrity as an academic institution will be called to account, as will the good Methodist name, by the authenticity with which it brings the larger record into public view. But when it’s so displayed, from the falsified need for an unnecessary war and the hurried tax cuts, to the dicey upsurge in homeownership and the growth of corporate welfare and power, to the empowerment of neocons at the expense of an overburdened middle class, it’s a record that clearly marks the Bush-Cheney tenure as the most destructive presidency in history.

Does this proudly capitalistic nation have the resiliency still to live down this dismal chapter? Not unless capitalism reawakens to its essential purpose of spreading wealth faster than it concentrates it.   On that score, the current thrust does not look promising.

Frank Mensel – February 2013

The Antarctic ice cap is now melting twice as fast a previously estimated, according to scientists who track the change. The melt portends rising seas and a grave threat to cherished beach communities around the globe. A recent forecast pegs the rise at three feet by 2100. But the global warming driving this threat may be hastening mankind’s demise faster by another change that science is not yet talking much about. The atmospheric pollution that is melting the ice caps is also melting the sperm count in men.

This phenomenon apparently is not yet being tracked globally. But France recently reported that the sperm count among Frenchmen has fallen by one third. Are the biosciences asleep on this fear? Do the National Institutes of Health keep no data on such a trend across the nation, or by States or Regions? In the l990s a professor biochemistry at a major American university told me that he had been keeping random readings of sperm count for several decades and the downward trend was very real in the United States, and maybe around the world. He estimated that if it fell as much as half globally, it would leave people unable to reproduce.

Science has been making it increasingly clear that nations and tribes will exist only until they’ve worn out their welcome on earth, and not much longer. But how sweet the revenge of the earth, and how ironic, if our wasteful ways should bring our end by impotency, sparing the earth the need to bury us in the messes and misery we’ve so willfully created.

These threats are not unrelated. In fact they have the same root. Carbon pollution of the air we breath perpetrates and perpetuates both.

Sperm banks in every nation could mitigate the one threat for a generation or two, but they are hardly a long-term solution because the newly born boys would face the same loss of sperm count.

This is just one more powerful reason for every nation to act quickly and decisively in reducing carbon emissions. It can be done without massive sacrifices in the convenience and comforts by which the advanced nations live. It comes down to living smarter by living simpler. This transition must be programmed to create new jobs just as abundantly as the upward spiral of consumption has done; it would be a new yet fitting test of American ingenuity and the American Dream. It can’t be done by neocons’ infatuation with “trickle down” economics and the paranoid arms race, both of which have served only the growth of oligarchy.

The challenge demands both personal and collective action. Obesity is unacceptable. It too is a threat to fertility, yet a far more urgent threat to national productivity and economic competitiveness. Let us grow by sacrifice, including less dependence on highways and airports, on cars and air travel. A good start would follow the lessons of Europe and Japan, and go them one better  in crisscrossing both the nation and the cities with high-speed passenger trains. Many major cities could be connected by  overnight sleeper trains.  For example, Dallas, the center-most city between east and west and possibly the fastest-growing metropolis, could be just such a ride from Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Tampa and Phoenix, among numerous possibilities originating elsewhere.

The job potential and fuel economies to be realized from the construction and operation of such a system would be enormous over a generation and beyond. We know that forty times as much freight travels by train on the same fuel a truck would consume over the same distance.

This is but one of the bold moves that the age of technology demands we make to prove we can live smarter and better by living simpler. Technology holds high promise of helping us live simpler and better, at the same time curtailing these twin threats to our survival. So far, technology has been erasing jobs faster, by robotics and other applications, than it has been growing them. But with new approaches, it could just as well be doing the reverse.

Such promise is already showcased variously in the growing numbers of jobs that employees of both the private and public sectors are doing from home on computers. This pattern is growing rapidly among public agencies that now operate on a four-day workweek, or give employees a day of work at home, or a combination of both. Innumerable consultants are learning they can maintain rewarding careers by working entirely from home. In both instances, the savings of both time and fuel lost in  commuting and clogged traffic are substantial, and a favor as well to the health of both themselves and the earth.

The possibilities are boundless. Technology may in fact prove capable of helping the earth save humanity. But in their lust to grow global trade and their bottom line, corporations must pause,  then pull back on, or modify, products that feed global warming. However much they pooh-pooh this threat, they can’t help but know that science knows far more about it than they know. Happily, the hard facts are all going science’s way. Global warming is a threat on which the corporate world can’t afford to be wrong, any more than the rest of us can afford to be wrong about it.

Equally important to free people, technology is re-leveling the ground on which democracy grows. It is an immediate door to opportunity and invention, irrespective of higher education, wealth or corporate power. It is a marketplace of ideas and patents that has made more than few instant billionaires, like Mark Cuban.

Its power in politics is just beginning to unfold. If people care enough, it will arm them to break the hold of special interests, aka corporate power, at every level of American government, and enable bipartisanship to prevail consistently over the ideologues who too often are gerrymandered into perpetual hold on office. Though the South lost the Civil War, the States have come to wield a power unforeseen in either the Confederacy or the Constitution. Corporations for profit are formed by state law alone, free of any duty to the public interest, and as the big ones have become global webs, neither the States nor nations have the power to adequately regulate them. Yet technology may yet prove the people capable of using it to put WeThePeople in charge again of the public’s business. Paradoxically, charitable corporations are answerable to government and the people, because must must prove to the IRA that they are in fact performing as charities in order to avoid taxation.

Surely science is growing its power through technology to reach the mind of every citizen directly. It could well be the supreme test of both science and technology whether this connection grows strong and sure enough to enable representative governments to blunt corporate power and reverse global warming, in time to stabilize the oceans and the sperm count, before these paired threats erase us all.

Frank Mensel – January 2013