2016 March 25^th

Fox has a program called “Outnumbered” in which four very short skirted women sit, two on each side of a male guest. Today a tape of President Obama’s departing remarks to some young Argentinians was played. The President pointed out that some will refer to dirty Capitalists and others to the awful Socialists and Communists, and that his advice to them was to take from each position what works for them. Outrage followed from the Fox folks and that outrage ended my interest in their program. We all know how well the image of the greedy Yankee Capitalist has worked in Latin America…about as well as fifty years of a heavy handed embargo worked in Cuba. And now, on wards and upwards, even though we have stopped offending most of Latin America, we still have 1.3 billion Muslims to work on.

Senator Mitch McConnell, on an earlier Fox interview program, said that Judge Merrick Garland could not be approved for SCOTUS by the Senate, even after the election, because the Judge did not have the approval of the National Rifle Association. No, I didn’t make that up; that is what he said. There you have it folks; the leader of the United States Senate bought and paid for by the NRA and showing no reluctance to admit it. What do you suppose he cost them?

In an interview with Senator Cruz we found him red faced and furious over Donald Trump’s very unflattering picture of the Senator’s wife. Looking directly into the distance Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward and told him to “leave my wife the hell alone.” Cruz was terribly upset. The reporter, Hallie Jackson, who is assigned to monitor Cruz, and was right at his elbow when he erupted, asked him if he would still support Trump if Trump were the party’s nominee. Cruz was not about to answer that one; he wasn’t that mad at Trump, so he said that Trump would not be the party’s nominee. Hallie Jackson tried twice more getting the same evasion each time, before giving up. (I must say that although I am no fan of Donald Trump, I have never seen the man snivel. Perhaps I missed it.)

I saw Senator Tom Cotton on Morning Joe this morning. He appeared because of his combat experience and the terrorist disaster in Belgium. Mike Barnacle asked Cotton, who had blasted the administration for its handling of ISIS, to tell the viewers just what he would do differently. For a Harvard educated lawyer Cotton’s response was a pure boilerplate conservative pitch. When reminded of all the bombing sorties flown against ISIS targets Cotton said that the “rules of engagement” needed to be changed because many of these planes returned to their base without dropping their entire ordinance. The conclusion to be drawn from Cotton’s comment is that if you can’t find an appropriate ISIS target, at least drop your bombs on somebody. He subsequently went on with more equally inane suggestions; one of which was bemoaning the removal of Libya’s  Muammar Khadafy whose only fault was blowing up Pan Am 109 and killing 240 people.