Couple opines that American voters deserve a better choice

Happy election day: a day for which our loved ones have fought and died.
Mom recently dug up the certificate of Dad’s Navy officer’s commission. It says he earned it in the mid-spring of 1944. But Secretary of the Navy Forrestal didn’t sign Dad’s certificate until June 7th – “D-Day plus one.”
Secretary of the Navy Knox had died of a heart attack on May 19th. (And you thought you had a tough job.)We guess that after the Allied armada landed on June 6th to drive fascism out of Europe, Forrestal finally had time to straighten up his old boss’s desk and sign those officers’ commissions that had been stacking up. Including Dad’s.
That was before “too politically powerful to fail” megabanks invented home foreclosure “robo-signing”, to feloniously evict American taxpayers who had just bailed those banks out. (What system did Dad – both of our dads – fight for?)
And that was before “penny-wise-but-pound-foolish” attacks on our hard-working Secretary of Defense for visiting his family in Monterey County. Secretary Leon Panetta is fighting our way out of World War IV for pay that’s less than a lot of chiefs of police collect. And his communications equipment doesn’t run up a high bill for keeping in “secure” contact with his top-flight right-hand man, (an admittedly sexist term), who mans (also an admittedly sexist term) the fort in case somebody tries to blow up the planet over Christmas.
(Navy Secretary Forrestal became our first Secretary of Defense after flying his way through World War I and fighting his way through World War II and into the Cold War. Meanwhile, his wife, who was a cheerful chorus girl in New York’s Ziegfeld Follies when they met, tail-spinned into alcoholism and mental illness. And in 1948, the year of the besieged-Berlin Air Lift, they found Secretary Forestal’s broken corpse 16 floors below his Navy psychiatric hospital room after – you might say “His parachute didn’t open.”)
It’s always “D-Day plus one” around our place, too, Secretary Panetta. But it’s our last chance to straighten up OUR battle-scarred desks and write a Guest View before the election.
So: “May the Farce be with you.”
Because once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there IS a presidential campaign. It used to star “Snow White” (Michelle Bachmann) and the Seven Dwarves: “Grumpy” (“ex-Speaker from the Black Lagoon” Newt Gingrich), “Gropey” (“What part of ‘Nein! Nein! Nein!’ don’t you understand, Herman?” Cain), “Doc” (“Doctor No”, Ron Paul), “Holy” (who else but “Jolly Saint Rick” Santorum), “Greedy” (Willard Mitt Romney), “Spacey” (Texas governor Rick Perry) and, uh – like you did during that Republican primary debate, Rick, we “spaced out” on who the other Dwarf was. “Oops!”
It looks like the better Republican candidates “passed” until 2016. Because it’s not easy to unseat a sitting president. And way back when they had to start their campaigns, who expected the Bush Crash to crater into Bush’s Not-So-Great Depression? (It took this long to get unemployment down around what it was at the end of President Reagan’s first term and what it was when Bush fumbled the handoff to President Obama – of an economy that was already bleeding 800,000 jobs a month.) Then:
Donald Trump beat us to it and finally “Trumped” (“fired”) himself.
Grumpy (Gingrich) quit after a penguin bit his right middle finger. (Not sure we buy Grumpy’s penguin story. Especially the way he kept gleefully displaying his alleged wound to the hated press corps after he quit.)
And Holy (Santorum) finally caved in to Party establishment pressure to not be Greedy’s (Romney’s) “spoiler” – as Greedy caved four years ago and Senator McCain eight years before that. The pay-back is being the Party establishment’s “inevitable” frontrunner in 4 years. (That’s why Greedy cagily invested $42 million of his own fortune in the 2008 primaries. When Greedy stopped bullying Senator McCain, he started being first in line for the 2012 nomination.)
So the bad news is that, as usual, the primaries were over before we Californians got to vote. The good news is that 55% of our Republican amigos polled didn’t want to have to swallow any of the Seven Dwarf choices on the Party menu anyway. And 40% of those who voted for Greedy wished there’d been somebody from this planet to vote for.
Maybe voters noticed that Greedy’s tax cuts for the super-rich would either balloon our middle-class tax bills or balloon our deficit, by Nobel Prize-winning economists’ estimates, by up to $10.7 trillion – while almost eliminating Greedy’s already-lower-than-his-chauffeurs’ taxes. And videos of Greedy’s say-anything-to-close-the-deal “Mitt-flops” have “gone viral”: flip-flops on criminalizing birth control even for co-conspiring guys, on stonewalling immigration reform for our farmers and farmworkers, on respecting Bin Laden’s Pakistani residency, etc. Greedy titled his 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece “Detroit Should Go Bankrupt” – though the lack of private financing would have meant the loss of 1.4 million American jobs. Instead, those jobs were saved and G.M.’s the #1 automaker in the world again – and now Greedy’s claiming credit for President Obama’s success. But the president cheerfully replies that the Obamacare Greedy now attacks – and which is a Xerox copy of Romneycare from when Greedy was governor of Massachusetts – covers preexisting conditions like Greedy’s flip-flopping “Romnesia”.
Having taught the economics class from which Ferris Bueller understandably took the “Day Off”, we can vouch that Greedy knows what to do with American companies, all right: cannibalize them for parts. Like Michael Douglas (“Greed is good!”) in the movie “Wall Street”, he was a greasy-haired Gordon Gecko-ish corporate raider selling off the parts and firing people. (Remember Mitt’s unscripted slip, “I like to fire people”?)
And Greedy owed a lot of his profits to government bailouts. First, he took huge government subsidies – corporate welfare. Then he siphoned off huge bonuses and “management fees” from the corporations he raided. Then he put the raided companies into bankruptcy so he could pocket their pension and health-care funds. ($44 million from one pension fund alone, which taxpayers bailed out with: $44 million. He pocketed taxpayers’ $10 million Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation bailout, too.) The Olympics feat he brags about – (no, not the loss in London by the prancing “dressage” hay-burner for which he takes a $77,000 a year tax write-off) – we can “write off” to the Olympic-record $1.5 billion in government “pork” he bragged (at the time) about raking in from taxpayers to foot his Utah Olympic-sized bill.
Greedy’s “baloney-coupon” voucher plan would “end Medicare as we know it”, immediately erase the extra benefits Obamacare gives them and make seniors (who average $22,800 a year in household income) foot the bill for $6,400 a year apiece in escalating medical bills – while enriching Greedy’s insurance industry donors. And with his track record of raiding pension and health care funds, how will Greedy, as vice president-wannabe Paul Ryan and George W. Bush tried to do in 2005, “end Social Security as we know it”?
America lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs under George W. Bush. So President Obama has worked hard to rebuild our (defense-crucial) manufacturing sector with half a million new jobs so far out of the 5.2 million new private sector jobs he’s helped create. And Obama joined with our Congressman Sam Farr to pass trade agreements which increase our local agricultural exports. But as we write this, a company owned by Greedy has its American workers training workers from Communist China to take every single one of their manufacturing jobs.
Our dads both fought antidemocratic one-party systems: fascism (“Naziism”) in World War II and totalitarian socialism (“communism”) in the Korean War. (Greedy wants the job of being our armed forces’ commander-in-chief, though no one in his family – which first came here in the 1840’s – has ever served our country in uniform.) And while Greedy bravely demonstrated in favor of the Vietnam-era draft but then avoided service while luxuriating in a castle in France that was furnished with a “personal chef”, our late brother fought in Vietnam’s jungle for three years against communists armed by Red China. (Which later became Romney’s partner in profiteering by pioneering the shipping of American jobs overseas.)
So, however you vote, we speak from the heart when we thank you for observing Veteran’s Day early and honoring our veterans’ sacrifices – by exercising your right to a so-called “choice” on “D-Day”, Nov. 6th.
And “May the Farce be with you.”
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister.