Will the GOP Hear "The Chimes at Mignight?" They be Tolling, Cupcakes.

I could never bring myself to link up with the Grand Old Party.  I am just an old school Regular Democrat, I guess.  Ever since Chuck Percy was the alabaster Illinois Face of the Republican Party, the GOP was as comfortable a fit for me as spun-glass skivvies.

Right up to and through the last GOP Illinois Senator, Marque Kirque, the GOP is the Party that blows off it's own toes, on demand, at the behest of wily Illinois Speaker Mike Madigan, or the offish Sen. Dick Durbin.

I voted for three Republicans in my life: Nixon 1972, McCain 2008, Romney 2012.  I voted for Donald Trump, but I do not believe that he is a Republican. In fact, he may be, like me, a a disgusted Regular Democrat who understands that the national game is rigged between the Progressive 1972 Democrat loonies and GOP dweebs,  like any contest between the Globetrotters and the Generals.

President Trump is one wild card in deck full of jokers.  Against Old Maids like Reince Preibus and Lindsey Graham he is the trump.   Against Aces like McCain, Collins, Schumer, and the media masters, he's a push at best.

He is a ball of confusion; that's what the world is today. Hey, hey.

• North Korea
• Trans GI's
• Tweet du jour
• CNN silly
• Russian Intrigue
• Sessions Up; Sessions Down
• Leakers - pissing out of the Big Tent
• Foul Mouthed Mooches
• White House staff shuffles
• EU weepers

But, the best rattle and hum comes from the GOP.

One of the only Washington writers who makes any sense whatsoever is A. B. Stoddard.  Ms. Stoddard is the sole of integrity and does care if CNN, Fox, of the clowns at MSNBC want to hear what she has to say.  Ms. Stoddard offers up this today,

 Trump can write this all off to his plan to disrupt the GOP establishment in Congress and do things his way, but some have warned his plate-breaking might eventually cut into his base of support. Conservative writer and commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote that not only had Trump revealed “a deeply repellent vindictiveness in the service of a pathological need to display dominance,” but that his assault on Sessions “suggests to those conservatives how cynically expedient was Trump’s adoption of Sessions’s ideas in the first place.”

Trump must be some Machiavelli, there Neighbor.

I think of him as a seedy, aging and cagey Prince Hal.  Young Prince Hal, the scapegrace Prince of Wales  who hung around with disreputable outsiders in Henry IV Parts I & II emerged as the uniter in chief and hero of Agincourt of Shakespeare's Henry V.

Prince Hal, like Trump loves to keep his enemies close and his friends comfortably numb.

Read this and think of the Swamp:

King Henry IV, Part I

ACT I SCENE II London. An apartment of the Prince's.
[Enter the PRINCE OF WALES and FALSTAFF]
FALSTAFF Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
PRINCE HENRY Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon
benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to
demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. 5
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the
day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes
capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the
signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself
a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no 10
reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of the day.
FALSTAFF Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not
by Phoebus, he,'that wandering knight so fair.' And, 15
I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as, God
save thy grace,--majesty I should say, for grace
thou wilt have none,--
PRINCE HENRY What, none?
FALSTAFF No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to 20
prologue to an egg and butter.
PRINCE HENRY Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly.
FALSTAFF Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let notus that are squires of the night's body be calledthieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's 25foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of themoon; and let men say we be men of good government,being governed, as the sea is, by our noble andchaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.PRINCE HENRY Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the 30
fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is,
by the moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of goldmost resolutely snatched on Monday night and mostdissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with 35swearing 'Lay by' and spent with crying 'Bring in;'now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladderand by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.(emphases my own)

I see Falstaff as the GOP leadership, elected and behind the scenes, ready to lead Donald Hal up the garden path for a fleecing from the Progressives - the keepers of policy.

Yet, Hal offers warnings in his honeyed words to Fat Jack of the Swamp.  He must go before the real work begins. In Shakespeare's propaganda plays, virtue remains hidden in the likes of Mark Antony, The Bastard and Prince Hal.  These nimble players keep every one off balance.

Until the moment comes when even the most shameless and cynical rogues, like the Leader of the Senate and the three Mavericks, finally get it.

 FALSTAFF
God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING HENRY IV
My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man.
Lord Chief-Justice Have you your wits? know you what 'tis to speak?
FALSTAFF
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HENRY IV
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

I hope that the firing of Preibus and appointment of General Kelly signals that Trump despises the the dream of the GOP being anything but a partner in the Swamp.

That would unite the nation.

I could do without an Agincourt. 

The GOP - Making America Great. . . again, and again, and again, or "Is This Your Homework, Larry?"

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives was set on Thursday for a cliffhanger vote to repeal Obamacare, as Republican leaders worked to deliver President Donald Trump a win for one of his top legislative priorities.
House Republican leaders have expressed confidence the bill would pass and several party moderates who previously objected to it got behind it on Wednesday, giving the effort new momentum.
Still, the vote was expected to be close. Even if the measure passes the House, it faces daunting odds in the Senate where Republicans hold a narrower majority.

The Grand Old Party.

Say it with me.

Sounds better than Republican.

A Republican, when I was growing up, wore grey clothing and had a very bad haircut. He went to non-Union barbers in Roseland.  There were not many of them. They took commuter trains to work in the Loop at places like the Board of Trade, Quaker Oats, or Morton Salt.

They were Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists and Non-Denominational Billy Graham fans. They were the minority population of Englewood, the Highlands, Scottsdale, West Lawn, or Brainerd.

Their kids went to public schools, belonged to the Cub/Boy/Girl Scouts, the Y and went to Bible camp in the summer.

Our Dads took the bus, the L, drove early model Buicks, Pontiacs and Chevys to the Stockyards, Standard Brands, Central Steel and Wire, Kenwood Construction, Boyington House Movers, Donahue Steel, the County, City Hall, Canfield's Bottling and National Can Corporation.  Some worked in the steel Mills over by the Lake, most worked nearby.

We went to parish grammar and high schools or high schools operated by the Carmelites, Sisters of Casmier, Mercy Nuns, Irish Christinan, or De LaSalle brothers.  Some very few were educated by the Jesuits at St. Ignatius - they were really smart.

We swam at Park pools and they swam at the Y.

We stayed out of the Y - naked swimmers and birth control.

Politics was as easy as being a White Sox, or Cardinals fan.   I do not recall any great affection for George Halas's team back in the 1960's.  We liked Green Bay, Oakland and the Jets.

The Cubs?  I knew two families, the Sitorouses and the Balinas.  The Balinas moved to Rolling Meadows, wherever the hell that was, in 1964.  Nick Sitorous went to mass where Louis Farakhan demands that the Jews get what's coming to them and whitey too. Nick was Greek.  He was not a Republican, but he loved the CUBS and fixed television sets.

The rest of us were Italian, German, Belgian, Dutch, Polish, Lithuanian, Jews and where I lived predominantly Irish.  Many of the younger families were mixed. Diversity was called white flight bigotry.

The Republicans could never win an election.  They supported Planned Parenthood, used to belong to the Klan, kept Catholics and Jews out of the American Eagles clubs and kept to themselves, which was OK by us.  We waved.  They waved back.

I remain a Democrat, even though the Party is more like the cold, humorless and robotic GOP that I recall from my wonder years.  I voted Democrat for President until Barack Obama.  I had gotten to know young Barack Obama, executive director of the Woods Fund, congressional candidate, Illinois State Senator and U.S. Senator, before he became the Untouchable Candidate and President.  I found him to be a dope.  He has not let me down.

Worse, the Democratic Party, which had once been as honestly invested in the neighborhood and its people, as any parish, had become a branch of the Unitarian Abortion and America's Biggest Critic Book and Alchemy Club. 

Try and find a union bug on a Progressive Democrat's business card.  Good luck with that.

However, The GOP is worse.

They are screw-ups.  Hand a Republican a winning Lotto ticket and he goes to debtors prison.

Obama had some of the nastiest, wealthiest and committed  people in America directing his every prompt, move and triumph.  The Progressives.

The GOP remains dominated by the tasseled loafer crowd of Judge Smails opportunists like John McCain ( for whom I worked like a dog in 2008, only to watch him quit like Girl Scout in a downpour ditching the cookies and heading home), Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and so many others.  Paul Ryan has become as noodle spine-ed as Yertle the Turtle and the other two war-happy phonies.

With seven years of whining about ObamaCare, the Budget and House Committees on Everything, the people voted in change at the executive, legislative and a tiny,tiny bit at the judicial branches of government.  The GOP benefited and has done . . .nothing.

I credit President Trump with keeping his promises and energetically doing exactly what the American people demanded.

Right out of the chute, Paul Ryan screwed the pooch on the Affordable Health Care recall.

Now, only weeks later the GOP are trying to force another failed vote.

These clowns are like a very few of my students who write forty characters of a 500 word essay on Frederick the Great in dull tipped pencil on a single page badly torn from Tommy Doyle's notebook on the way to school, when Times New Roman # 12 font is required and MLA citation demanded,  without any mention of Prussia, much less the Enlightenment- " Is this what you wanted?"

Is THIS your homework, Larry?

That is the GOP.

I do not consider  President Trump to be a Republican.

I find hope and change in that fact.  

Rauner, The Illinois GOP and Me

 

Rauner said if elected, he would partner with Michael Shakman to work out a settlement that includes a federal hiring monitor. His remarks came after Quinn on Friday released the names of more than 100 clouted state transportation employees who were part of what the state’s top ethics watchdog dubbed an improper hiring scheme. Quinn also said he would keep the 103 IDOT employees on the payroll.  Sun Times

Here on the south side, we have an odd custom.  Let's say, I am walking up to County Fair and my neighbor Mike Regan is driving by me on the way from that great grocery and without looking at me fires his arm out of the driver's side window and at the end of that limb is The FINGER!

Do I get upset and worrying that I might have offended Mike?  Not at all.

Or, let's say I am walking to Kean Gas at 111th & Talman and I hear familiar voice 'Hickey, You ugly old A$$hole!'  Do I recoil in horror at this attempt to define me. Not in the least.  It is a kinsmen voicing this ave.  Cousin Bub coming from Cardinal Fitness over by Maplewood.  We are odd ducks who salute one another with jocular offense and the towel snapping familiarity of friends who know every wart on our fannies.  This is a closed circle.

I am an UnEvolved Democrat*.  That means that I continue to think that life begins at conception, Communism is still a huge threat to the American worker, government should protect people and not enrich sycophants and reward the  demographic du jour and that Republicans are the political party that blows off its own toes.

Abortion was once only acceptable to people like Chuck Percy.  Communists were only electable in Hyde Park. Sycophants were only kept around by Ward bosses for laughs and never boosted to seats on the County Board, or made President of the Chicago Transit Authority every political job holder whether white, blue, or scoop collar beefed about every other race, creed and color's prestige in the Cook County hierarchy. The Irish Catholic is was and shall always be universally loathed and largely shrugged off.

Michael Shakman, a Hyde Park Democrat, changed utterly the Democratic Celtic Twilight of the Daleys et al. and continues to defraud Cook County and the State of Illinois of millions of dollars. Shakman begot every goof in government from Dick Simpson to Pat Quinn.  The Ward organizations no longer exist, but talentless grifters have amasssed numerous pensions for jobs not done from death of Old Man Daley up to the cuurent Carpetbagger on the Fifth Floor. When Cook County residents bolt rigid with shock at each despoiling of their way of life and stutter,'It Can't Get Any Worse'  a Martin Oberman, or a Forrest Claypool lands new Six Figure sinecure with all of perks.

Then there are the Republicans.  The once free-booting back-slappers of Du Page County who ruled
suburbia and downstate from Governors Len Small to Jim Edgar have devolved to a race of bloodless toadies who allow anyone (Eric Zorn, Carol Marin, Pat Quinn, or Sheila Simon for God's sake) to define them.

In his race to lose against the historically hapless Gov. Pat Quinn 2010, Rep. Pat Brady allowed Roe Conn and Richard Roeper to define him as a tax suspect as well as the monstrous master of Pat Quinn Boss Terry Cosgrove of Planned Parenthood to define him as a Lady Hater.

If you are going to succeed in Illinois as GOP office holder, one must be defined and like it.

Only Judy Baar Topinka is a bullet proof because she will dance the polka with any definer. 'Want babies dead? You got it.'

Billionaire Bruce Rauner is in the race to lose against the historically hapless Governor Pat Quinn and he is not only allowing himself to be defined, but he is going full Topinka.  Trying to belittle Pat Quinn is like trying to define the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. God handled both.

Then Bruce Rauner, the Cathcart festooned, beater driving plutocrat wine-guzzler, goes even goofier than Quinn by pledging more tax-dollars to the four-eyed bandit Michael Shakman

Why am I not a Republican?

I will not be defined by people who don't know me, don't like me, or don't get me.


* AKA Reagan Democrat, Close-Knit Ethnic Democrat, 19th Ward Democrat