When I was a child, I was cute and precocious and smart. I scored very high on all my early tests, and my parents and teachers loved me.

When I was eight years old, I was cited by the police twice in two nights, first for shoplifting at the local Safeway and the next night for throwing a brick through the window of the Lutheran Church–while my parents were back in Iowa burying my grandmother (and this was just three weeks after I lit an empty licorice pack and tossed it into a dry patch of woods abutting an apartment building, calling out all of Hood River’s fire engines–they never nailed me for this one, but I was questioned heavily, and everyone involved always wondered).

It didn’t ruin my life, though. I may not have realized why, but I sensed early that being a young, straight, white male meant that I didn’t have a higher standard to live up to. I was a complete fuck-up, but I didn’t have any predetermined suspicion against me, so all was forgiven, and I was free to move on with my life. I could have become a pillar of the community, a Mayor or a Congressman or a Senator even, if I hadn’t chosen to squander my second and third and fourth chances on an adult life of alcohol and sloth and jobs that were either beneath me or that I held onto by my fingernails through a combination of obfuscation and glad-handing, hoping no one would figure out that I had little clue what I was doing.

The Great American Tradition had always meant being able to be a Caucasian screw-up and never having to say you’re sorry, and that tradition didn’t start to fracture until Joe McCarthy and, later, Watergate.

Of course, everything would have been different for me if I’d been black or gay. America has gone kicking and grumbling toward giving either constituency any power, influence, or respect at all. If I’d been either of the oft-affronted constituencies, I might have thought differently. And I would have had a lot more to answer to.

I can’t speak to what it’s like to be a gay male in 2009. But I’m tired of hearing about how The Gays are going to destroy our society. I thought we were finally past this madness, until Proposition 8 passed in California on November 4, in what was otherwise an almost-unblemished referendum on positive human values. So it was an undeniable point of pride in Portland, Oregon, when this past May we elected the first openly gay mayor of a major American city. He was elected in the primary, in fact, by a margin that didn’t require competing in the general election.

So this should have been a great week for not just Portland at large, but Portland’s gay community specifically. Sort of like, well, I don’t know…maybe if we put a black man in the White House or something.

But if you Google “portland gay” this week, you’re going to get a very different set of results (though Steam Portland is offering three free months to new members who sign up before January 20th).

Our new mayor, Sam Adams–openly, proudly gay in a city that a city that doesn’t judge its citizens or leaders on the basis of their sexuality or their peccadilloes that have nothing to do with their capability to govern–fell into that eons-old middle-aged male trap of thinking with his penis, and as the pattern goes, finds himself in very hot water and his constituents on hold.

I hate to side with the scolds, especially after living through the Clinton Impeachment debacle. It was common knowledge for years that he was dipping his pen everywhere else but in Hillary’s ink, and no one cared as long as their 401(k)s were going through the roof, and our kids weren’t dying en masse overseas. When Ken Starr, after years and years of flailing and never connecting with anything but the wall, finally came up with a handful of blowjobs from a then-22 year-old intern that Clinton lied to cover up, nobody cared. He had a 69% approval rating when he was impeached by a Republican Congressional cabal that had been trying to nail him since before he took office, and the Americans would have none of it. The Republicans got clobbered in the ’98 midterms and lost their Speaker (and his successor) in the process.

The message was clear: As long as it doesn’t cost me money, it’s a man’s private business what happens between his penis and his wife/buxom mistress/Denny’s parking lot prostitute/cabana boy.

That said, I have a very different take on Portland’s (latest) sex scandal. Our local affair is all bad, though, and so very tawdry–and possibly illegal. We’re not just talking marriage vows violated or a chowder stain on a blue dress. And Sam Adams will be neither the first nor the last gay middle-aged man tantalized by the allure of an attractive young man, and normally I would be all for it if it would help him govern more effectively.

The problem is, first, that the object of the new Mayor’s lust was barely an 18-year-old man at the time, and was possibly 17 years old when they consummated. We’re a little funny that way when it comes to our kids. If you don’t believe that, you can call Roman Polanski and ask him–but call soon, because it’s almost 10:00 PM in France right now. His victim is in her 40s now, and he still can’t come back.

The Ick Factor is fairly high here, in large part because the Mayor’s actions hovered perilously close to classic sexual predator behavior. He brought the boy into his office when he was 17 years old, lavished him with gifts under the pretense of “mentoring” him, and drove 50 miles to attend the boy’s 18th birthday party–very shortly before the then City Councilman saw the statutory green light to consummate his sexual relationship with the newly-legal–and I’m not making this up–Beau Breedlove. His staff at the time was very nearly apoplectic at the perceived impropriety and urged the Councilman to get the kid a job at Abercrombie & Fitch and get him him far away from the office, even if he wasn’t slathering him in peanut oil and having him bring him Mai Tais.

The other problem is that the Mayor lied about the affair to get elected. Repeatedly. His primary opponent, Bob Ball, raised concerns about the relationship in 2007 and was dismissed for smearing his opponent for political gain.

To make matters worse, one of the reporters who was relentlessly pursuing the story was hired by Adams after his election to be his director of Sustainable Development–even though the 28-year-old had no experience in direction, sustainability, or development, and the $55,000 salary she would earn under Adams was far higher than what she was earning as a reporter for the Portland Mercury.

So once again, it’s not just the crime (if there even was one, but it’s very close, and in any case it doesn’t help the issue) but the cover-up. And if I were a gay man I would be livid this week. We have enough problem with knuckle-dragging morons in this country terrified that legitimizing Gayness will be the end of civilization as we know it, and that God-fearing straight men will have their wives and girlfriends taken away to lesbian training camps and the only sex they’ll ever know for the rest of their lives will involve biting down hard on a pillow or with their face pressed against a hard, cold bathroom tile floor. Here you have the first openly gay mayor of a major American city–and this is the baggage he brings. If this passes, I know you have the goods to govern this city effectively and even be a great mayor, but Jesus. Thanks for giving the morons cause to say “See, I told you so!” So very disappointing.

*Thanks to Neil Kerr

I just read the other day that, in this age of prohibitively-expensive fuel prices, the buzzword “staycation” has entered our lexicon, like a masticated wad of Almond Roca suddenly stuck in our collective fillings. In case you missed it on Oxygen or in Parade magazine, the stay-at-home vacation, or…well, you get it. Anyway, it’s all the rage among erstwhile summer vacationers in our cash-strapped economy. You can take the kids to the park and let them float kit boats in the pond, catch a dusk movie in the park (it’s the non-white-trash resurrection of the drive-in theater; you can also learn about it on Oxygen or in Parade magazine), walk down to the farmer’s market and buy fresh endive and tayberries for dinner salads on your deck, catch up on the last three Harry Potters, and maybe even cross off a few chores that you’ve been dreading for awhile or get your six-month teeth cleaning without having to take time off work. It’s a vacation without the gas and the parking and the lodging, the boorish tourists pushing the carry-on limit, and the TSA workers getting overzealous with the body searches.

I’m all for it. I hate airports, especially post 9/11, and the more people who decide to eschew their EPCOT Center getaways and staycation in their spinning classes and tending to their basil gardens, the fewer shrill, chattering, pushy cul-de-sac dwellers that I have to deal with when I just need to get to Denver or San Francisco in relatively short, painless order. Besides, the price of fuel is a boot on our neck that isn’t going to let us up for air anytime before Abigail Breslin’s children graduate from college.

(God bless the suburban travelers, they deserve to have vacations with their families, and so help me, I’ve really tried, but when it comes to airports, I’m really not a people person.)

You may have noticed these last few weeks in veepsblog.com some prominent and somewhat sloppy gaps, similar to Shane McGowan’s dentition. I don’t want to disappoint anyone coming here for the latest geographical faux pas by John McCain or to see if the redemption journey of Mark Foley has progressed and he’s cracked the Veepstake 500.

Truth is, though, it’s July, and everyone else like me who’s in the punditry business has gone on vacation (and, unlike me, are actually paid for being in the punditry business and get paid vacations).

So I’ve been on my own staycation. And it’s been a joy. Persimmon and poppyseed bagels on a bench down by the local aviary, where I’m finally getting around to Tuesdays with Morrie and Chicken Soup for the Soul (step off–I’ve been busy; I haven’t even gotten to A Million Little Pieces yet). Last Tuesday I painted my nightstands (puce–it complements the doorjambs), then Thursday I went to the dog-run and planted a tree and said a prayer for Amy Winehouse. Then…

Oh screw it. I guess you can call it a staycation if you want, but I’m still going into my dayjob every day and coming home to languish in the squalor of my Southwest Vancouver, Washington, neighborhood. When I manage to make it outside, I watch the arguing crack addicts from my porch, and the toothless fortysomething woman arguing with herself over at the bus stop across the street. If I don’t feel like walking outside, I can look out my second-floor kitchen window and watch my shirtless neighbors fistfight below. Everyone else may be on staycations this summer, but I’ve merely had a culmination of events and circumstances that have prevented me from giving due attention to veepsblog.com for the last week.

I had a dental appointment last week, which is unpleasant on the best of days, but especially grueling if you haven’t been in the chair in over nine years and it goes on for two and a half hours (my teeth look marvelous now–seriously). The rest of the week was answering the call and stepping up for extra duty at my day job (I’m not rich and famous yet; it’s still about the rent and something to throw into the frying pan every night), dotting some i’s and crossing some t’s related to my previous habitation, delirium starvation from being too tired to remember to eat, and finally a crushing case of the flu that has left my skull feeling like I’ve been pithed and my entire body like I’m pinned beneath a full bookcase.

And given the latter, that’s about as much as I can muster tonight.

I’ll be back in full gear very shortly. We have an election to cover–and a book to sell. For another day or so, we’re all about the melatonin and Advil and recuperating. For now I have good reason, above and beyond our book.

The universe works in mysterious ways, and there’s nothing more mysterious than a documentary filmmaker wanting to put Wayne and myself on film. I know our Veepsession is all very interesting and we tell a great story through our various tics and peculiariarities and fixations, but a movie? I don’t know. He’s a very nice young man and very professional, and if he really wants to follow us with his camera, he’s more than welcome. Since we first talked, I’ve never completely understood his interest, but he’s persistent, and he’s held our interest.  More as it progresses.

My only demand: He’s paying for his own food. I have a crown I have to pay for (don’t worry–it isn’t going to affect my close-up).

For a few hours today (before the few clearer heads in the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign apparently intervened and won the day), the Republican Economic Plan for the next four years was “Let Them Eat McCake.”

There’s a reason Phil Gramm’s Presidential campaign in 1996 never got traction, and he proved it all over again today. John McCain’s chief economic adviser offered a tough-love tonic to Americans desperate to keep their heads above water in the midst of a flood that’s demanding all of us pay through the noses we’re trying to breathe through. “You’ve heard of a mental depression? This is a mental recession. We have sort of become a nation of whiners…You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.”

I would say I’d gladly buy a tank of gas to any Texan who can prove they’ve seen former Texas Senator Phil Gramm down at the Gas-N-Sip filling his own tank in the last six months, but even if he couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it for him, which he can, it wouldn’t make any difference, because it’s not going to mean a relative dime to his pocketbook. There’s nothing better about being rich than the contempt you develop for those so unmotivated and unpopular that they didn’t have the juice to develop the revenue streams and the connections to generate those revenue streams that would keep your mind on your business and off bitching about how much life costs.

There’s a certain bootstrapping, Horatio Alger charm to that, but I see my barista and garbage collector straining and sweating at least as much and probably more than doughy Phil Gramm has ever done on his best day.

Fred Barnes says “this was straight talk!…We haven’t had a recession. People think we’re in a recession….they claim about how bad the economy is, and it’s weak…although I see  now that they have record sales at Wal-Mart, and people are right through this downturn spending like mad.” Yes, people will do that when they want to eat.

There’s a school of thought that says we should take the callously wealthy and kill them. Just shoot them against the wall with a blindfold with pinholes so they can get a slightly obscured view of the gun that’s about to fire the bullet that’s about to execute them.

I have a more enlightened view. My goal is empathy, and it’s very modest. If you’ve made dizzying millions in any given tax year, you’ll be eligible to continue to receive your part of George Bush’s 2001 $1.35 trillion tax cut. However, for every million you make, in order to be eligible for those tax cuts, you should be required to spend one day scanning groceries at Wal-Mart. Or pumping gas at Shell. Or working in a cubicle taking phone calls from people think it’s your fault that they don’t know what the “Start Menu” is on their Windows Vista operating system because it doesn’t say “Start Menu.”

The late comedian Andy Kaufman made a nice dime or two, but he was no Phil Gramm, or Fred Barnes, yet at one point late in his life, he went to work bussing tables in a deli “just so I can remember what real work is like.”

It’s just another variation on “walk a mile in my shoes,” but it’s an important variation on that.

You would think that if Phil Gramm had any hope of becoming Treasury Secretary, or holding any other position within a McCain Administration, it would have evaporated immediately upon his impolitic, humanly tone-deaf comments; that he could hardly have done worse than if he’d accused the Jews of not conceding the efficiency of the Nazi rail system.  But the McCain held their ground for several hours today.

This from Sam Stein’s dispatch on HuffingtonPost.com today, from an unnamed “McCain official”: “Mr. Gramm was simply saying that we are laying out the economic plan this week…We’re laying out that plan this week with an emphasis on the critical importance of job creation, and it’s been a great success so far.”

That spin was gone within hours. The campaign released a statement, “Phil Gramm’s comments are not representative of John McCain’s views.”

This was just ninety minutes before Gramm appeared before the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board as a representative of the McCain campaign–and repeated that we’re a nation of whiners.

“I’m not going to retract any of it. Every word I said was true,” Gramm said.

If there’s a hell for the wealthy, please let it be an assistant manager position at Hot Dog On A Stick.

Any politician worth his salt should also have seen Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway’s 1992 documentary, Feed.  Seventy-six minutes of the year’s Presidential aspirants caught on camera muttering inanities, losing their temper, and generally having less than dignified moments while they were standing before the cameras but somehow allowed themselves to believe that, the presence of the cameras and microphones notwithstanding, their private moments would remain private and that the public at large would never view their raw moments and coarse humanity.

Jesse Jackson learned his lesson the hard way in 1984 that there are no private moments as a most public figure. During January of that year, he was in a discussion with The Washington Post’s Milton Coleman when he referred to New York City as “Hymietown.” Jackson was shocked, shocked  when his comment–his comment he uttered in front of a live reporter, who is every bit as dangerous as a dead microphone, and after an intervening period in which he accused the Jews of trying to derail his candidacy and sparked the unhelpful ire of surrogate, Nation of Islam leader Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who pointed a finger at the unnamed Jews and threateningly intoned, “If you harm this brother [Jackson], it will be the last one you harm.”

A little late to PR101, Jackson would eventually slink into a synagogue in Manchester, New Hampshire, even though he continued to dig his hole deeper and deeper, noting that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.”

He’s clearly a slow learner, so it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise today when it was disclosed that, awaiting his appearence on FOXNews this weekend, talking smack about Senator Obama. Jackson was waiting for his appearance with UnitedHealth Group executive Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, when he said, “See Barack been, um, talking down to black people, on this faith-based…I want to cut his nuts off.” He punctuated his statement with a bite of his lower lip and a slashing upward gesture as evidenced by the lurch in his right shoulder.  He’s a very slow learner, apparently, as he thought that whispering his comment afforded him some privacy.

He’s also a very slow learner in that, again, he believes that this is in any way at all a private moment. Speaking on CNN’s Situation Room, he explained that he didn’t realize his mic was on. Sound familiar? All I could think of was the defense attorney a blood-spattered client professing his client’s innocence on the basis of the technical impropriety of a search that uncovered a bloody knife and an email on his client’s computer to his alleged victim reading, “I’m going to slice you open like a pig, bitch.”

Reverend Jackson is apologizing for what was, again, “a private moment.” In other words, he’s apologizing for being caught.

One of his swiftest detractors was Senator Obama’s national campaign co-chair. “I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Reverend Jackson’s reckless statements about Senator Barack Obama. His divisive and demeaning comments about the presumptive Democratic nominee — and I believe the next president of the United States — contradict his inspiring and courageous career…The remarks like those uttered on Fox by Reverend Jackson do not advance the campaign’s cause of building a more perfect Union.”

Indeed. And there was more. “Reverend Jackson is my dad and I’ll always love him,” said Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. “(But) I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric. He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”

There probably won’t be much that will come of this little dustup, but glimpses of Jackson’s private side have belied his public persona. In that he’s not much more different than a number of politicians, if only a little more craven. In any case, “I want to cut his nuts off” doesn’t do much to feed the “up with hope” message. And, for the last time, Reverend, there’s no such thing as a dead mic.

Short one tonight. I have to mind the ramparts and keep my place from going up in flames, because of my moron neighbors setting of fireworks.

The Declaration of Independence was a brave and noble thing. Most of the words of this epic document came from the hand of the estimable Thomas Jefferson. Just to set the record straight, the Declaration of Independence wasn’t actually written until after July 19, 1776. Congress voted on July 2 of that year to declare independence from Great Britain.The wording of the document was approved on July 4, hence our national holiday. The Declaration of Independence that you and I have seen in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. was actually signed by the attending Congressional delegates on August 2.

But July 4 is when, as a nation emancipated from British rule, we celebrate by blowing shit up.

I grew up in and do most of my business in Oregon, but I currently live in Washington state, across the river from Portland in Vancouver, Washington. Our state is more popularly known as the home of the Seattle Supersonics–oh wait, that was before Thursday, when they packed up the moving van and headed for Oklahoma City. In any case, we’ve still got Microsoft. And we also have far more dangerous fireworks for sale than are available in sensitive, tree-hugging Oregon.

I laid down some coin with my former wife a few years ago and these things are damned expensive. I don’t know how my neighbors manage it in the current economy. Especially since many of my neighbors are recently released from prison and have methamphetamine habits. They started last Friday night, and it’s been an every-evening event since then. They can do it tomorrow night but they have to stop before July 6, in accordance with the recently-amended law. It’s still a lot of goddamned money though. Every Army-grade munition that goes off is costing them $4 or $5 a pop, and they’ve been doing it for days. As one smart young man I work with noted when I told him of the rampant fireworks and the proliferation of smokable narcotics in my neighborhood said, “That’s bad Meth Math.” Word.

It’s more than a little amusing how we’ve gotten from the heroics of the Continental Congress to barbecueing hot dogs, drinking beer from cans and getting in fist fights with our neighbors, and setting off explosives.

If this is the way we bare our testicles to the world, then so be it. It just seems very far removed from the Boston Tea Party.

SOILING THE POOL: One of the great American stories is that of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying within hours of one another on July 4, 1826–50 years after the signing of the declaration of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, had actually died in Monticello earlier that morning. Adams stirred and awoke long enough to whisper his last words, “Thomas Jefferson survives”, and himself passed away that 4th of July evening.  Jefferson’s last words had been, “Is it the Fourth? I resign my spirit to God, my daughter, and my country.” Abraham Lincoln’s first Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, also passed away on July 4th, in 1891. Jesse Helms voted against the Martin Luther King Holiday resolution on his grounds that the Reverend King was a Communist sympathizer. His entire record considered, he really wasn’t a nice man. Hannibal Hamlin wasn’t a cretin, but he has a better place among the deceased of July 4th than Jesse Helms.

This is what Barack Obama said at a fundraiser in San Francisco ten days ago. “Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. They fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration and each successive administration has said that these communities are somehow going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising that they get bitter and cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to express their frustrations.”

I don’t have a problem with that, but I’ve already voted, and I don’t have a problem saying anything like that, but I’m not running for President and coming up on one of the biggest primaries of my campaign in ten days. I grew up in a small town, and never mind the reasons for their bitterness, you don’t mess with these people’s religion and you don’t mess with their guns. I remember my brother wanting to get a “Guns Don’t Kill People. People With Guns Kill People.” bumper sticker before concluding that that was the kind of thing that, in our town, would invite a brick in your windshield.

The cheesesteak and the bowling incidents were telling (he refused a cheesesteak at one Pennsylvania campaign stop, and he bowled like a one-legged girl at another): He may have been a community organizer and can sit down with anyone on the South Side of Chicago, but he’s got no small-town street cred, and it shows.

I’m amazed that this escapes him, given his organizing background. In organizing as in political campaigning, the “When in Rome” principle should be in full effect. This is an ongoing problem with the Democrats and is largely responsible for giving us two terms of George Bush. Laugh if you will at the “who do you want to have a beer with?” sniff test, but people are essentially tribal and will naturally distrust anyone whose customs are different from their own.

This election could easily swing to John McCain because Obama sucks at bowling and won’t eat a cheesesteak, and McCain has boozed, whored, and raced his sports cars, and isn’t afraid . This is also the same affliction that torpedoed George H.W. Bush in 1992. He was already suspect as an out-of-touch blueblood who blamed his 1988 Iowa caucus defeat on people being busy with their daughters’ coming out parties. He effectively ended his campaign when Bill Clinton was biting his lip and genuinely feeling everyone’s pain at the second town hall-style debate, and the cameras and the crowd caught an utterly out-of-place President Bush looking at his watch.

If the Democrats lose a third Presidential election because America mistrusts a candidate who knows the difference between arugula, cale, and endive, and publicly admits to enjoying mahi mahi tartare, Howard Dean should be run out of Washington D.C. with torches and pitchforks. They can’t stop there. The next head of the DNC needs to use party funds to organize and mandate for every candidate an American Breadbasket Reality Immersion Symposium where they have to spend a month learning how to relate to the Great Unwashed. It will be lunch bucket boot camp. For four weeks, they’ll eat with their fingers, drink beer from cans, and clean the garage. Dinner won’t be pan-seared marlin, but the $8.95 buffet at Izzy’s, where they’ll go back to fill their plate two additional times and finish with a cinnamon roll that’s so painfully filling they have to loosen their belt at the table, and will have no compunction about doing so.

The Democratic Party cannot possibly hope to take the White House until they shed their elitist pretensions and learn to behave like and relate to average, ordinary, slovenly Americans. Every day they’ll get up to their own alarm clock and eat breakfast at the Pig-N-Pancake. They’ll do this every single morning and they’ll sit at the counter and talk to Bobbi the waitress and Chet the trucker passing through on his way to make a drop in Duluth. They’ll be set up with a bank account containing $495.67, which will be replenished by the same amount every Friday. The night before payday, they’ll have to decide between paying their cable bill or their electric bill so they still have money left to drink that evening. Over the course of four weeks they can, among other things, expect to:

• Attend a Bon Jovi concert.
• Eat a chili dog with one napkin.
• Fix a toilet.
• Shop at WalMart in conditions simulating the day after Thanksgiving.
• Witness a bar fight.
• Drink beer in a plastic cup served from an openly-displayed keg.
• Get their hair trimmed at Super Cuts.
• Purchase a lap dance to the accompaniment of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”
• Download pornography from the Internet.
• Discharge a firearm in a rock quarry or at a small- to medium-sized woodland creature.
• Watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship with five randomly selected members of their peer group.

This is the only way the Democrats can be saved from themselves and rescue their voting bloc from a Republican Party that is happy to lend a sympathetic ear and welcome their votes, but give them nothing but the business end of the plunger, award tax breaks to their corporate bosses, export their jobs to Mexico and Vietnam, and send their sons off to die in unnecessary wars.

It’s too late for Obama, but there’s still one way he can save his Pennsylvania bid and his greater candidacy: he needs to take a weekend off from the campaign trail and head out on a fishing weekend with four unemployed mill workers turned tire store workers and cable installers, and come back after three days in a pair of Carhartts, a hoodie, and a Skoal trucker’s cap and march through Altoona and Allentown and the Susquehanna Valley giving his God, Guns, and Gravy mea culpa just like he did after the Reverend Wright controversy, and pray that they’ll forgive him, as long as he eats the goddamned cheesesteak this time.

Well, I know she hasn’t engaged in sexual acts for money–or, to give her the same benefit of the doubt she gave Barack Obama about being a Muslim, I haven’t seen anything to suggest that she has. She has one of the bigger dicks in Congress, but I don’t think she’s a secret hermaphrodite, and even if she is, I haven’t seen anything to suggest that she engages in really freaky sexual acts for money.

Randi probably should have issued a partial retraction. I’ve seen Hillary Clinton–she isn’t that big.

In the end she stuck to her guns, and good on her. Air America’s Randi Rhodes quit this week rather than apologize to Senator Hillary Clinton for calling her a “big fucking whore” at a non-broadcast San Francisco Air America event last week.

An unnamed source cheered Rhodes’ resignation to The Huffington Post. “Many people screw up and then apologize and move on. Like Imus. Like David Shuster. Like Jay Rockefeller on McCain. Like Obama on Rezko. Like Hillary on Bosnia. Randi Rhodes refused to apologize for her obscene comments and has chosen instead to terminate her relationship with Air America. No one is upset. She made the move but there’s relief and joy.”

Boo and hiss. Imus dissed young women who didn’t deserve it. David Shuster dissed Chelsea, who didn’t deserve it. Rockefeller should have apologized, because, like it or not, short of being incinerated by incoming missiles, McCain very nearly got as good as he gave with his five years in captivity. Obama shouldn’t have gotten himself dirty with Tony Rezko, but he apologized for a questionable real estate deal when Rezko was under investigative heat, and that was enough.

Hillary should have apologized for Bosnia, because it was a mind-blowing lie, which she explained away to sleep deprivation even though she repeated it something in the neighborhood of five times, but that isn’t why Randi called her a big fucking whore. Well, not only for that at least. This whole election has been about Hillary behaving badly, and there has been no accountability. I laughed about this when I first heard about it, but I sat on the fence for a few days while I decided if it was right or wrong.

It doesn’t matter. It was Randi Rhodes’ right to speak her mind and she did it. “She refused to apologize for her obscene comments.” Her comment was controversial, but Hillary Clinton’s behavior this year has been obscene bordering on snuff-film territory.

To wit: She hired as her chief campaign strategist Burson Marsteller CEO Mark Penn whose company has been the hired apologist for Romania’s Nicolai Ceaucescu, for Union Dynamics for the Bhopal tragedy, for the Saudi government for their connections to 9/11, for the owners of Three Mile Island, and has helped several corporations crush union organizing drives within their companies. This is the point man representing Hillary Clinton, friend of the American worker and citizen. When six railroad tankers of benzene get accidentally dumped in Chagrin Falls, Ohio’s drinking water supply during a Hillary Clinton administration, the man hired to rehabilitate the reputation of the corporate offender responsible will be the man who was hired to help get Hillary Clinton elected President.

She sat down for an editorial board meeting with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, whose publisher, Richard Mellon Scaife, devoted much of his money and most of the 1990s to destroying the Clintons. Clinton surrogate James Carville has called Scaife “the Godfather of the Right Wing Conspiracy” that Hillary spoke of with Matt Lauer eleven years ago. She claimed that the meeting was just another in her attempts to reach across the divide and make peace with the Clintons’ enemies, but she used her pulpit with the Tribune-Review to continue to raise the Reverend Jeremiah Wright issue to pummel Obama with. One of the Sunday pundits opined that this was akin to the lamb lying down with the lion. Not quite: It’s the lamb lying down with the lion and bringing lots of lamb chops.

She agreed with the rest of the Democratic field to support Howard Dean and the DNC’s moronic decision to not seat at the convention any delegates from any state that tried to move its primary up ahead of Super Tuesday, yet she was the only major Democratic candidate on the ballot in the Michigan and with Senator Obama in Florida. She said in October that “Michigan’s votes aren’t going to count” come primary time, but now is the aggrieved voice of the disenfranchised, threatening to instigate a credentials fight at the convention to seat Michigan’s delegates–who would, as it happens, go to her, since she was the only marquee Democrat not to honor her pledge to pull herself off the ballot.

She stands to gain a majority of Florida’s delegates if they’re seated as pledged. Obama should have pulled himself off the ballot there as well, but likely stayed on as a matter of self-preservation after seeing what Hillary did in Michigan. In any case, Hillary was the only one of the two making conspicuous appearances in Florida before the primary and getting photographs taken with palm trees behind her in visits that weren’t campaign stops but certainly appeared that way to the Florida Democrat voter who saw only two names on the Presidential ballot and only one of those making appearances in the state.

She’s talked of twisting the arms of committed Obama delegates, and added fuel to the Obama Muslim rumors, and played the sex and race cards to protest the fact that she’s losing this election.

Hillary’s been a horrible person throughout this campaign and bully for Randi Rhodes for calling her on it. Someone had to finally.

They had her over a barrel really. She was appearing at an event as “Air America’s Randi Rhodes”. They can ask whatever behavior they please in that circumstance. She can also speak her mind. And she did, and didn’t back down. Hillary Clinton is a big fucking whore and bully for Randi for saying it and not apologizing.

It’s not easy doing the thankless work of democracy. I’ve been busy at this blog nearly daily for the last three-plus months trying to spread the unhearded gospel of the Vice Presidency. It’s a little dispiriting being a lonely voice in the wilderness touting the unheralded importance of America’s #2 elective office when everyone is so obsessed with who’s going to have their name first on the campaign button. It’s been a long and solemn road, but I may have finally started gaining some traction as I was offered an invitation to appear on a local Air America affiliate and discuss America’s undiscovered love affair with its Vice Presidents.

I came loaded for bear. I very much wanted to discuss Theodore Frelinghuysen’s choice of Silas Wright on the 1844 Whig ticket and how rumors of Charles Francis Adams’ sexual dalliances with his brother’s female slaves undermined Martin Van Buren’s 1848 Free Soil candidacy. I also had a saucy joke about Winfield Scott’s #2, William Graham. Unfortunately, I think my passions may have been a bit too heated for the 7:30 AM drive-time audience. They kept the focus on Wayne’s and my upcoming book instead (Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance, Top Shelf Publications, $19.95. ISBN 978-1-60309-003-2).

It was an enjoyable and rewarding visit, though, and I’d like to thank Carl Wolfson, Heidi Tauber, Paul Pimentel, Tom Hartman, and the good folks at Portland Air America affiliate 620 KPOJ AM for welcoming me on their broadcast this morning.

I would also like to extend my thanks and encouragement to my lead-in guest, Howard Zinn. He is a fresh and innovative thinker in the field of History and, with some maturity, shows great promise to distinguish himself in the world of American Academia. A number of my co-workers at my temporary office job are already familiar with his writings.

On a much graver note, he knocked another one out of the park during today’s Armed Services Committee hearing when he asked Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker if al Qaeda was a larger threat to the United States in Iraq or on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. As Crocker trotted out his boilerplate answer that “al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is…”, Biden cut him off.

“Where is most of it? If you can take it out, if you had a choice, the Lord Almighty came down sat in the middle of the table and said Mr. Ambassador you can eliminate every al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan or every al Qaeda personnel in Iraq, which would you pick?”

Crocker tried desperately to stay on message, but was clearly rattled by Biden’s persistence. “Given the progress made against al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities of the fact it is solidly on the defensive and not in a position as far…”

“Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?”

“I would therefore pick al Qaeda in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border area.”

“That would be a smart choice,” said Biden.

Indeed. Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post wrote last month that “(al Qaeda in Iraq) is little more than a Rotary Club version of the notorious terror organization,” numbering somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 individuals.

That was of little note to Ambassador Crocker and General David Petraeus who were more interested in selling Congress and the American people on the Iraq model that just needs a little tinkering and she’ll run like a champ for another hundred years.

The continued justifications by the administration and their commanders feels increasingly like men marinating in bad cologne and chafing in cheap off-the-rack suits trying to sell us on a shiny ’95 Chrysler Sebring that belches blue smoke (“Just a little hiccup!”) and requires an extra elbow for the power driver’s side window to go all the way down. And both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker today looked like a few sad sacks who had been peddling slightly-used conflicts for way too long.

I smell a resignation and tell-all book sometime very soon in General Petraeus’ future. His heart isn’t in this any more, and like the man trying to peddle the “like new” 1998 Taurus he knows was held in police evidence for three years after it was driven by a drunk into a crowded nightclub queue, he just doesn’t have the spin anymore for a conflict that is costing us somewhere in the neighborhood of $340 million per day, over 4,000 American lives to date (never mind the dead and displaced Iraqis, whose numbers are so great no one has a reliable count on), and has long since lost the support of the American people. “We haven’t turned any corners,” he lamented.  “We haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.” But things are getting better, except for Basra the past few weeks and bombs landing on Nouri al-Maliki’s doorstep.

In other words, “Well, it’s got its original upholstery. And it’s still in real good shape. It comes with the Scotch-Guard. And, um, it’s got the Kraco stereo, and it comes with eight FM presets. You like to travel? ‘Cause it’s got a spacious trunk. You can fit all your luggage in there. You have kids? Because this is a real safe ride. Real safe. My wife and I used to own one and we drove it to Yosemite with our two boys every other summer. Hardly ever had to stop for gas either.” Awkward pause. “So, what’s it gonna take to get you in this beauty today?”

And you can smell the bourbon on his breath as he excuses himself to talk to his sales manager to see if they can take another few hundred off the price tag, knowing full well you’ll be gone by the time he comes back from heading into the breakroom for another belt from his flask, resigned to another Saturday afternoon, another lost sale, because he knows he can’t sell these cars like he could back in the good old days when he was across town at the Subaru dealership.

Petraeus lost me pretty early in the sale today, and I was off to my car in a hurry. Sure, I was late for work, but still, this car’s seen a hundred miles of bad road, and I’m no closer to buying it than I was when it was shiny and new five years ago.

Friday was Day 2 of the Randi Rhodes Suspension and I’m not ready to join the choir and say that she was wrong. For a few months now, there have been intermittent murmurs about Hillary’s dubious choice for her campaign’s lead strategist, Mark Penn, whose own company has “dubious” practically written into their mission statement.

Besides his day job pointing out heads to cut for the Clinton campaign and as President of polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland, Penn is CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller.

Early in the campaign, one of Clinton’s early sacrificial lambs was her New Hampshire Campaign Co-Chair Billy Shaheen. During an earlier interview, Shaheen had helpfully pointed out–only for the good of the party, of course–that he worried that Obama just wasn’t right for the nomination because of the candidates admitted past drug use (the admission had been made in Obama’s memoir, Dreams Of My Father–published in 1995; these weren’t bakery-fresh revelations that Shaheen was commenting upon). Shaheen resigned and went back to the hotel to await the trickle-in arrival of the considerable remainder of the martyred surrogates of Survivor: Clinton ’08, apologizing for making Obama’s cocaine use a campaign issue.

And there the story ended. The story about Senator Obama’s drug use, which no one had brought up before the Clinton campaign’s Shaheen. Because the campaign shouldn’t be about the fact that he used drugs. Hillary apologized to the Senator, and Mark Penn went on MSNBC’s Hardball to fully support Shaheen’s resignation. “Well, I think we’ve made clear that the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising and I think that’s been made clear…”

John Edwards’ senior strategist Joe Trippi very nearly popped a vein. “I think he just did it again. He just did it again. Unbelievable. This guy’s been filibustering on this, he just said ‘cocaine’ again.”

Penn objected to Trippi’s interpretation of his comments, and was quick to point out, “I think you’re saying ‘cocaine.’ I think you’re saying it.”

Well, whoever said “cocaine” in the same discussion about Barack Obama, Penn made it clear that this shouldn’t be an election about Barack Obama using cocaine, and that effectively put the issue to rest, after the next four news cycles, and there’s nothing he can do to control what comes up when someone types in “barack obama cocaine” in Google, and he certainly can’t keep a good Christian housewife from Scranton or Columbus or Manchester from saying, “I kind of liked Obama, but I did hear he had a drug problem.”

The other murmurs related to Penn have had to do with one of Burson-Marsteller’s marquee clients, Blackwater, who last fall needed some serious P.R. help in the wake of a government-contracted Iraq security assignment where, according to military reports, Blackwater guards unloaded their weapons on unarmed Baghdad civilians, killing 17 of them.

Penn made the news again Friday when it was disclosed that he had met with one of his clients, the government of Colombia, to discuss a trade agreement that Colombia is pushing…that Hillary Clinton is on record as opposing. Penn explained the meeting as “an error in judgment”. I’ve made a number of errors in judgment in my life, but for the ones I didn’t follow through on, I always caught myself before I got into long-distance travel and lodging arrangements, and actually fulfilling the trip.

Well, the smell of something Clinton. What’s new?

Someone I know very well (and doesn’t want to be named) is doing a catering this weekend for a Hillary Clinton event in Portland. She’s happy to have the business in this recessed economy, but she’ll hold her nose as she cashes the check. “I liked Bill Clinton, but they’re horrible now. All of this mudslinging and crap just makes me sick. I’m voting for Obama.”

So, Penn was caught looking innocent with blood and feathers hanging from his mouth. This wasn’t a calculated sacrifice like Shaheen or Geraldine Ferraro, I don’t think. This was just one of the foxes hungry for a chicken he thought no one would notice missing. He didn’t eat any prized fowl–no one cares about Colombia, after all–and he’s going to be useful to keep around when any of the other chickens step out of line.