Politics: The corner of Truth and Reality, and step on it

Text and photos by George Molé

Soon after last month's election, the media began to explain to us that President Obama had been reelected largely because African-Americans, Hispanics and other members of minority ethnic groups comprise a growing segment of the electorate--and they support liberalism and the Democrats overwhelmingly.  Most of the media appeared quite thrilled with this state of affairs.  And, of course, polling seems to bear it out.

But maybe it's my good fortune that I tend to encounter people of independent mind.

On a Thursday evening in mid-November, I got into a yellow cab in midtown, almost late in meeting a friend for dinner.  The driver, a black man, was listening to WABC, the AM radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative hosts.

"You're listening to my favorite station," I said.

"We lost," he said, with an accent I pegged as African.

"Excuse me?"

"If this is your favorite radio station, then I can say to you--we lost."

He meant the election, of course--he was a Romney supporter, and we started chatting about the state of the world. I asked where he was from.

"Nigeria," he said. "I know what inflation is about."

"Well, inflation comes from debt," I ventured.

"From debt!" he almost shouted. "We are at 16 trillion.  Are you hearing me?"

"Oh, I'm hearing you, pal."

"Obama cares," he said sarcastically. "But after 'cares' comes facts. He is giving out the goody-goods. But from where? And the rich men, who they demonize, will not invest."

I glanced at his hack license. His last name was as similar to the last name of the president as it's possible to be.

"Well, let me ask you this," I said. "They say the Republicans have trouble reaching immigrants. What do you think is the answer to that?"

"There are few channels for the message," he answered. He gestured at the radio. "Rush is a very intelligent man. But ABC is liberal. By grace they allow Rush and Hannity to speak, but they are few."

We happened to be rolling past the building on Sixth Avenue where Fox News is headquartered, and he gestured toward it. "Fox is the only channel propagating conservative ideology. We need more. Are you hearing me?"

I not only heard him, I could have wept from hearing him. Free thought, real thought, of the kind you won't see in the media, from a real person of the kind you won't hear about from the pundits, amid the canyons of Manhattan. Almost a religious experience.

Then, more recently, during my work day, I got talking with a man in an outer-borough neighborhood diner.  More intelligent conversation takes place in New York diners, by the way, than on any television chat show.

    
This gentleman was African-American, a bit older than me, having his lunch at the counter.  After I ordered my coffee to go, he asked me a bit about what I do as a cop, then told me he's an elder at a nearby church.  People talk to him about their lives, he said, and their choices.

"So many different kinds of problems," he said.  "Some of these young women can have three or four babies from two or three different fathers.  I don't know why they think they can conquer these guys by having a baby.  A lot of these girls are still in school, and they can't pay attention because their babies are at home."  The babies, in turn, he said, develop behavioral problems as they grow, and are then given medications to deal with those problems, "which just messes them up."

He seemed exasperated that so many would take paths that can lead only to a life of struggle.  And this led to his view that some government programs provide incentives for those poor choices--for example, by providing increased benefits, and sometimes apartments, for young women who have babies they can't support.

"I try not to be political, Republican or Democrat," he continued.  "But the Republicans talk about people trying to do something, put some money together, start a business, and the government takes it to help people who aren't trying to do anything.  I see what they're saying."

Being in my official capacity, I tried to be noncommittal.  "Well, that's an interesting point," I said.

"On one block in the area you can have 10 apartment buildings," the older man marveled, "with 50 or 60 apartments in each--and they're all Section 8!  Where can that money come from?

The waitress gave me my coffee and my check.

"Come visit our church," the man said, handing me his card.  And I will.

It only takes one pin to puncture the biggest balloon.  Can it be that each time someone thinks for themselves, looks at the world with fresh eyes, says something the media didn't tell them to say, it lets some air out of the balloon of our corrupt liberalism?  And if that someone is a member of a group that the left most arrogantly considers to be in their pocket, maybe the air rushes out a little faster.

Let's hope that 2013 brings us a lot more truth-telling--and if it's just a couple of guys kicking it around in a New York City taxi or diner, that's not a bad start.

New York: Rush Limbaugh at Town Hall, Tuesday night

Text and photos by George Molé

I knew we were in for an interesting evening when I saw the protesters across the street, ten or 20 raggedy-looking Occupy types, keeping it spontaneous and real with their professionally-printed signs.

The brilliant and controversial radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh--philosopher, satirist, humorist and scourge of leftists everywhere--was making a rare public appearance Tuesday night, November 29, in ultra-liberal Manhattan.  A single show for his New York fans, at the historic Town Hall theater, that he billed as "going behind enemy lines."  And I had tickets.

"Racist, sexist, anti-gay.  Rush Limbaugh, go away," the demonstrators chanted sporadically, kept behind police barricades on the opposite side of West 43rd Street from the theater.  The Ditto-heads, as Limbaugh's fans are known, jeered back good-naturedly.  ("I understand it's raining very hard outside," Limbaugh would crack later during the show, "which means that the Occupy people are finally getting a shower.")

For show-goers, any spirits that might have been dampened by the wet weather...

...were raised as we drew closer to the theatre, with its classic, warm exterior...

...which is matched by the understated beauty of the interior.

Limbaugh, scheduled to begin at 7:30, took the stage about 8, having waited for the entire audience, many of whom arrived late, to be seated before he began.  "I really want to apologize for getting a late start," he joked, "but it was your fault."

The show's format was not announced in advance, and I imagined Limbaugh would give us some sort of multi-media mix--perhaps some short monologues interspersed with video clips, guest appearances and music.  How else could a radio host entertain an audience in a theatre?  But instead, Limbaugh stood at a podium, on a sparsely-decorated stage, and did nothing but speak, apparently with no notes, for an hour-and-a-half--and with wit, passion and sharp insight kept his audience enthusiastically, raptly attentive for the entire time.

Limbaugh is a verbal jazz artist, and I found myself amazed, both in the moment and upon reviewing the transcript later, by the free-form nature of his monologue.  (And, I've noticed, his words don't translate too well to the written page; they're best heard in his voice, projected through the  prism of his personality as he speaks.)  He told stories of his early days in radio; riffed ribaldly on Barney Frank (since he won't be running again, his "seat is now wide open"); filleted the budget super-committee ("[i]t was never intended to succeed"); kicked around the Republican primary race; discussed his battles with his dad over the value of a college education; roasted the liberal media; and used the occasion of a protester in the audience to dissect the Occupy phenomenon.  All was punctuated by humor, and he even threw in a couple of quick, spot-on impressions of Barney Frank and John McCain.

The aforementioned protester provided one of the evening's quirkiest moments, managing to walk up the center aisle to a spot directly in front of, and a few feet away from, Limbaugh.  He then held up some sort of newspaper for Limbaugh to see--which the latter peered at amiably, seemingly trying to make out what it said--before finally being hustled out by yellow-jacketed staffers, throwing all his papers into the air on his way back down the aisle.

Limbaugh wasn't fazed.  "Now, when you see that," he joked, "I wonder why am I paying thousands of dollars for security?"

"These are people threatened by the truth," he went on more seriously. "It really is unfortunate. These are the people that think you owe them everything....This is what the education system has done to them. It's festered their resentments...And so they try to disrupt the things that are working. Now, I look at the Occupy crowd down there, and they've all got iPhones or computers. How do they think that stuff happened? They're out there protesting the very people and things and system that made it possible for them to have those things. Where do they think this stuff comes from?"

Limbaugh's summation of the Tea Party movement was more positive--and, I thought, quite powerful.  "Well, most of the Tea Party people, a good percentage of them, are people that have never, ever been formally involved in politics at all," he reflected.  "They just got fed up. They were shocked, scared, stunned to see what was happening to the country with all this mindless spending. All the debt being run up, they know what it means. They know what it means for the future of themselves and their kids and their grandkids, and it isn't good -- and so they started going to town hall meetings wanting to be heard for the first time; and because it was spontaneous, and because it's genuine, and because it was real, Obama and the Democrats in the media are scared to death of it because they have to manufacture that emotion."

Limbaugh's passion was most evident as he discussed America's founding and its philosophical underpinnings--the latter of which is represented in today's political arena, as he sees it, by conservatism.

"Really, the founding of this country is a miracle," he mused.  "The rule for human beings since the creation of time, since the creation of the planet, the normal, standard operating procedure has been tyranny, dungeons, oppression, poverty...It's been the standard. The exception to that has been the United States. The exception to what life was like for most every human being has been the United States of America."

And the greatest threat to the nation, in Limbaugh's eyes?  Liberalism, as represented by President Obama and the Democrat party.

"I can't get past the fact that if this guy in the White House gets four more years," he said, "you and I are not gonna recognize the country we grew up in. It's that serious to me.  And I know that humor is a great way to deal with things, and sometimes using humor can even be persuasive. But there's not a whole lot that seems funny to me right now."

Thankfully, despite that sense of concern, much of what Limbaugh told us in the heart of Democrat Manhattan was indeed leavened with humor, richly optimistic ("we [conservatives] have to tell ourselves each and every day that we are the majority"), and full of determination.

"Why do we have to settle for this?," he asked.  "We don't, folks. We don't have to settle for any of this. We don't have to settle for 9% unemployment; we don't have to settle for an incompetent in the White House. We don't have to settle for somebody that doesn't respect the country. We don't have to settle for somebody who doesn't believe in American exceptionalism."

"I'm trying to do as much as I can with what I have to reverse the trend that we're on," he added, "and save the country from the encroachment that we face from the left."

Thanks, Rush, and keep it up.  And try coming back to New York a little more often--there are more conservatives here than you might think.

Politics: Is Obama bungling the aftermath?

I give President Obama props for whacking Osama.  But aren't he and his administration seriously bungling the aftermath?  Osama was armed, he wasn't armed, he resisted, he didn't resist, his wife was killed, she was only wounded, etc.  Why was it so difficult to debrief the involved military personnel after the operation, decide what had to be left out for security reasons, and give the public an accurate and consistent narrative?

These conflicting stories, combined with suppression of the photographic evidence, will lead to decades of conspiracy-theorizing.

Politics: It was a wonderful Christmas morning, but we didn't get the pony

• This Tuesday, a breathtaking number of Democrat politicians were shown to the door by the American people, whose initial cautious support of President Obama's policies has become--in only two years--doubt, then dismay, and finally revulsion (see, for example, this poll).

At least six senators, 61 representatives and seven governors from the President's party are now standing on the unemployment line.  "We know that it was the biggest switch in House seats in a midterm in more than 70 years and the biggest swing in a Congressional election since 1948," one political maven told PBS.

A satisfying purge; a modern-day equivalent of the defenestration of Prague (a defenestration is when annoying public officials are shown, not to the door, but to the window).  And comforting evidence that we as a people have not lost all our values, intelligence and common sense.

• But it's still hard not to feel sadness at the political survival of Harry Reid, one of the more repellent figures in our public life.  As one example of his charms, Senator Reid joked in 2008 that in the summertime in Washington, “you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol."  And as a race-baiter he has no equal:  “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican," he mused in August. "Do I need to say more?”

Apparently he does, because he never stops talking and never stops offending (go here for a good recap of his ugliest gaffes).  But most importantly, Reid played a major role in ramrodding Obamacare through Congress.  The damage caused by that legislation is already beginning to be felt--AARP, for example, which lobbied for passage of the bill, is now citing it as one reason it is raising insurance rates for its own employees.

The most recent polls just before the election showed Reid's opponent, Sharron Angle, leading by one to four percentage points--yet Reid won the election by 5.6 points.  Does anyone believe he won it legitimately?  We've seen this trick so many times--races that a Democrat is on the road to losing suddenly being won when bushels of votes come in from urban areas, votes that can't be checked or no one dares try to check.  No wonder the Democrats, and their allies in the judiciary, are so set against laws that would require voters to produce ID or proof of citizenship (look here for a particularly galling recent example).

• Here in New York, we gave the Democrats yet another chance to run the state, much like Charlie Brown giving Lucy another chance to hold the football.  It's true that the Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, with his raw temper and undisciplined message, was a flawed candidate--while the Democrat, Andrew Cuomo, laid low and avoided controversy.  But how does that explain the results of the Attorney General race?  The New York Post summed it up this way:  "Staten Island's squeaky-clean DA, Dan Donovan, lost the AG race to utterly compromised Albany insider Eric Schneiderman."

And here's what we can expect from Schneiderman, the Post tells us:  "The proudly liberal Manhattan state senator and attorney said he will use his office to root out discrimination...promoting marriage equality, and prosecuting wage inequality against women in the workplace."  In a state where middle-class families are on the ropes, he will use his office to push for damaging change to the millennia-old institution of marriage (in liberal-speak, "marriage equality" refers to what some call "gay marriage").  And in a state which businesses are fleeing south or west as fast as they can find office space to rent, he will harass business with affirmative-action lawsuits or threats of same.

• So this Election Day, while indeed a happy occasion, left us--especially we New Yorkers--with quite a bit still to be desired.  But slow and steady wins the race, or some cliche like that.  Wait 'till 2012, when we really clean house.

• By the way, one of the best things about Election Day was the way the wonderful congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, put Chris Matthews in his place on live TV.  Matthews famously said once that he felt a thrill going up his leg when he heard President Obama speak.  This time, he thought he'd have some fun and slap Congresswoman Bachmann around--after all, isn't that what liberals get to do to conservatives on TV?  By the time the conversation had ended, he was sorry it had started.  Check it out here.

There's such irony in the fact that it is liberals who make the biggest noise about being for women's rights--yet their vision of women's rights is so shallow and, in many ways, so destructive.  But it is conservative women who are taking the lead, in many cases, in putting the country back on track.