Republican opposition to the president’a choice of a former Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, for secretary of defense was puzzling at the time to many Washington watchers. It’s far less so now.

As the GOP feared, Secretary Hagel is not the hawk that their hardliners expect in that role.  Because he is a Republican, they feel betrayed by his willingness to rein in military spending and take wind from their sails on their most reliable plank, the never-ending arms race. In late February, the Associated Press reported, “Looking beyond America’s post-9/11 wars, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel . . . proposed shrinking the Army to its smallest size in 74 years, closing bases and reshaping forces  to confront a ‘more volatile, more unpredictable’ world with a more nimble military. . . . He said the priorities he outlined reflect a consensus among America’s military leaders, but Republicans in Congress were quick to criticize . . .”

That consensus is widely questioned by Republicans in Congress who count on mindless calls for more defense, not less, to keep them in office. Unless they sing this one-note hymn, they are likely to face a Tea Party challenge in the Republican primaries. In the Tea Party, there’s no room for consensus, no room for bipartisanship, no room for the spirit of the Founding Fathers.

Afloat on the checkbooks of such billionaires as the infamous Koch Brothers, who are oligarchs verging on anarchists, the Tea Party has become the tail that wags the dog they’re making of the House of Representatives.  Will timid Republicans stand by and let the Tea Party destroy first the GOP and then the America once known as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Where are the brave today in the Republican Party?

May they draw courage from the example of Secretary Hagel, who puts country first, leaving ideologues to stew in their rancid brew. Who better than a Republican secretary of defense to show Republicans the global reality of the 21^st century?  He shows them what too many white, male conservatives have misplaced or lost:  grit.

“This is a time for reality,” said the secretary, while emphasizing the sea change that technology has produced in military preparedness. While the Pentagon’s budget is as large as the combined arms spending of the ten nations next in the race, the competition today from China and Russia is focused on technical prowess, not force size. Keeping a technological edge will provide more security than ground forces can.

Still, his budget request has prompted the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard McKeon, R-CA, to declare, “What we’re trying to do is solve our financial problems on the backs of our military, and that can’t be done.” Other Members of Congress are alarmed that Hagel plans to phase out various military bases, which are sacred cows in the states that have them.

Still the Congress knows budget deficits and the national debt cannot be reduced as long as the discretionary funding each fiscal year goes half to defense and half to all the domestic needs. That imbalance will keep us falling farther behind the global leaders on a broad range of needs, from health sciences to education and workforce development, to basic research and new technology — the source of the edge that is Hagel’s focus. His GOP badly needs his grasp of reality, and not the tunnel vision of Tea Party drum-beaters.

Frank Mensel — March 2014

Every time I’m about to admit that I’ve become a Texan, headlines erase that inclination. They remind me that Texas is not only big on the Tea Party ― seeing itself as the TP’s birthplace ― but also that it leads the war on women.

It bears that honor now almost by default. Is there another State that thinks less of its women than Texas? If so, there are legions of Texas health care workers who’ll be hard to convince.

These are the health workers who deplore and resent the loss of two-thirds of the Planned Parenthood Clinics that were shuttered by the Good’ol’Boys who control the legislature and the Capitol in Austin. A majority of the Texas women who most need access to contraception now cannot get it within reasonable driving distance. This blight is most devastating in southern-most Texas, the triangle between Brownsville, Laredo, and Corpus Christi.

In the most poverty-stricken area, around Brownsville, the only family planning left in play is provided by volunteer Latino women, prompting one doctor to remark, “It’s sad that Texas doesn’t care about its women.”

Texas is leading the nation in the growth of both jobs and poverty. Some analysts see both irony and poetic justice in the job growth, fueling the gradual recovery from the Great Recession, which has been the fallout of the dishonesty of the Bush-Cheney White House, a Texas duo with a reckless appetite for war. It is bound to be judged by history as the most destructive presidency in American history, saddling the people with unprecedented debt. The duo is an embarrassment to clear-thinking Texans.

But it is Austin and the Good’ol’Boys who control the Capitol that deserve the larger credit for the unprecedented poverty. Americans living in poverty today far outnumber those that were so stricken in the Great Depression, and Texas is the leading showcase, despite its surge in the labor market. Yet the Republicans ruling the Legislature don’t see it, or prefer to ignore it ― they’re too concerned about women making choices for themselves. Rather than allow it, they make abortion so restricted that the population of unwanted children, poverty, and gangs can’t help but go on growing. They gift-wrap it in billowing bluster. Austin lawmakers long ago raised bluster to an art form.

Too many of the jobs coming into the market now are minimum-wage, which is no longer a living wage in America. It hasn’t been since this century began. It epitomizes the war on women, for obvious reasons. Even in the best jobs, women still trail men in pay at the same job. Women are a large majority of the nation’s single parents, too many of them in jobs that pay only the minimum wage. Could Congress care any less about children and the debt-ridden future they face?

Today’s minimum wage is obviously contributing to the spread of poverty. It goes on growing as a weapon in the war on women. President Obama has jumped it to $10.10 per hour for workers under federal contractors, in effect challenging Congress to match it for everyone. But it’s choking the Republicans in Congress, notably the Tea Party band who are running the House.

Minimum wage could be a pivotal issue in the 2014 Congressional elections. It should be. It should bring women and progressives to the polls in droves. It’s an opportunity to both raise and level the floor of opportunity, the original promise of America the Beautiful. But don’t count on Texas to help.

Frank Mensel ― March 2014

The lingering racism in the nation runs very very deep. It becomes clearer every day that President Obama is in the White House.

It pulsates largely in two bastions: the very white men on the right who never thought for a moment that a black man could or would win the presidency, and the rednecks who thought the same thing.

It’s hardly surprising that his second term has made it more virulent. That it happened once made them think that they took too much for granted. That it happened again was much worse news: they had lost control. So, what’s to be done to regain it?

Their game, it appears, is becoming a systematic campaign to erase the first black president from history.  They are embarrassed and distraught that the president and the Democrats in Congress have enacted the Affordable Care Act, giving the people a door to the universal health care that every other power on the globe would not do without. Do they think the people haven’t noticed how comfortable their esteemed neighbors on the north are with universal health care?

The immediate focus of their game is to use the debt ceiling or the FY14 budget or any other lever available, even the extreme of closing down the government, to keep Obamacare unfunded. They fear that once people have it, they’ll like it. Will they go as far as shutting down the government or defaulting on the debt, because those are their only real options?

Their desperation is easy to grasp. They have to kill Obamacare, because if it pans out, then it makes his first term an important page of history. Their worst nightmare is that his second term could deliver the immigration reform that would bring more peace and progress to North America, and put him into the history books as the first important president of the 21^st century.

They can’t sleep knowing that he and his illustrious and luminous wife are sleeping in the White House. It is the  White House, dammit! It was never meant to be the home of any black person who wasn’t a servant.

Sleepless politicians behave even more oddly than their more rested colleagues. Why else would the new Republican majority in the House push mousy Speaker John Boehner into letting them drag the House to the floor 40 times solely to record a vote repealing the Affordable Care Act? Even the dimmest voters begin to fathom this waste of taxpayer money. The stacks of paper alone plowed into those 40 votes would erase a small forest.

After the first such vote, the next 39 could only be construed as a personal slap at the black president. It was an out-and-out show of Republican racism that the cable media tiptoe around in their usual haste to play down any news that could be unwelcome to their fat-cat sponsors.

The GOP is becoming more and more the dog wagged by its tail — the tail being the free-swinging Tea Party. The TeaPartiers are successfully working the Republican primaries with no unifying theme other than “something else.” They dream of simpler times with smaller government, and by something else they mean a first family that isn’t black. But what they get now, holding the balance of power in the House, is a string of symbolic votes that go nowhere.

Still, the Republicans can’t resist turning President Obama’s second term into open season in which they compete at slurs that will darken his name. The cheaper the shots the greater the fun. They turn his name into a game of inflections that sound foreign. An Obama in the Oval Office? Must be an oxymoron.

TeaPartiers are now talking loosely about impeachment. They won’t actually start it in their lap-dog Republican House. They know that even the dimmest wits who vote can see what an utter waste of legislative resources and public funds such an attempt would entail. But they talk freely about it because it casts another cloud over the black president.

Surely the people are beginning to see that the Republican deck of cards has too many deuces. Or is it a deck that’s all clubs and spades? Clearly no diamonds or hearts.

Frank Mensel — revised September 2013