Guest View: Where is America’s bipartisan mojo (Part 2)?

By Tom and Karen Lantz
In the World War II movie “Casablanca”, a fascist officer brags to American casino owner Humphrey Bogart that soon he’ll invade New York City. “Bogie” responds coolly, “There are some neighborhoods in New York I wouldn’t recommend you try to invade.”
The officer would have goose-stepped into now-rare “American bipartisan cooperation.” By both well-armed local gangs.
Speaking of high-crime New York neighborhoods, Wall Street’s “neighborhood watch” must be a counterfeit Rolex. Wall Street’s bankers “robo-deflated” all our home values when President Bush’s under-regulated “toxic mortgage-backed securities” market crashed.
Our American economy had already been under attack since Mitt Romney personally financed factories in Communist China in 1998 to pioneer the export of American jobs. Like when Goldfinger teamed with the Red Chinese to wipe out our gold stash @ Fort Knox.
It didn’t help our economy that only five out of eight Americans who voted in 2008 voted in 2010. Then the celebrating Senate opposition leader was “caught on camera” gleefully Kentucky-drawling that his party leadership’s “number one priority” until this November’s election would not be to, say, help small businesses and create jobs. It would be to hand President Obama’s tough job to “one of our own.” (Like “Mitt Goldfinger.” By, it turned out, sabotaging Obama’s economy-rescuing work.)
Now the Federal Reserve, America’s independent central bank, reports that employers’ and consumers’ “economic uncertainty” caused by those congressional saboteurs’ threats last year to not pay America’s bills – (such as Grandma’s hard-earned Social Security checks) – cost us over a million jobs. (Deducted from our “U.S. corporations have record profits and $3 trillion in cash but they’re uncertain about rehiring workers” economic recovery.) That “political cronies first, America second” tactic cut our economic growth almost in half last year. To elect the opposition party’s presidential candidate. The “uncertainty” about our economic umbilical cords even cut America’s birth rate.
And Congress’s torpedoing Obama’s tax-cutting American Jobs Act has cost us another 1.9 million jobs since last October. So, stay tuned for those congressional saboteurs’ Jan. 1 middle class tax increase “Taxmageddon.” Smaller paychecks for us to – unlike billionaires – “spend locally as soon as the ink is dry” will slam the brakes on our roller-coaster economic recovery again. Happy New Year, President Mitt Goldfinger!
On a happier note, our pro-job Congressman Sam Farr recruited a neighboring Republican congressman and a “used-to-be-Republican” county supervisor. Their diplomatic skills won now-rare bipartisan support – and a unanimous committee vote – to promote Pinnacles National Monument to “Pinnacles National Park.”
So, tourists won’t think the Monument is just a statue nobody should drive out of her way to see. Like Li’l Abner’s cartoonish hillbilly hamlet’s statue of Confederate General Jubilation T. Cornpone. (Although actor Chevy Chase’s “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movie family did squeeze in a side-trip from its disastrous pilgrimage to “Wally World” to see The World’s Biggest Ball of String.)
If the economy-sabotaging Do Nothing Congress passes Farr’s bill to boost our local economy, Obama will eagerly sign it. San Benito and Monterey Counties will both be “The Gateway to Pinnacles National Park.” (As well as “The Gateway to Baja Silicon Valley.”)
Our hard-working Assemblyman Luis Alejo goes the extra mile to “Get it done!” with the other party, too. But a recent county fair “pushed the envelope” of such local bipartisanship. The fair gods put the Democratic and Republican booths side-by-side. So a Democrat strolled over to the neighbors’ booth for a friendly chat and to “borrow a cup of sugar.” An amused Medicare-age (unless Mitt Goldfinger’s elected) female Republican – evidently their sergeant-at-arms – threw the sugar-borrower out of the G.O.P. booth. But in a neighborly way.
That local Democratic “diplomatic offensive” was more neighborly than Romney’s disastrous sequel to the Chevy Chase disaster-movie “National Lampoon’s European Vacation.” The British, “our closest allies”, thought Romney was more “offensive” than “diplomatic.” Their newspapers reacted to his loose lips with headlines like “Mitt the twit” and “Every party needs a pooper – that’s why we invited Mitt.” (At least the plainspoken British papers weren’t headlined – like the “Forrest Gump” movie’s bumper-sticker – “Mitt happens!”)
“The county fair affair” reminds us of Soviet “queso grande” (“big cheese”) Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 trip to America. Khrushchev wanted to go to Disneyland. But President Eisenhower said “Nyet!” (“No!”) No wonder Nikita didn’t “like Ike.”
Sadly, international neighborliness, like (sugar-lending) local bipartisanship, has self-imposed limits. Ike’s “Mickey Mouse and Goofy foreign policy decision” really put the “cold” in “the Cold War”.
But in fairness to Ike, he may have caved in to his less-progressive Vice President “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s “reds under every bed” paranoia: that Nikita would smuggle microfilm back into the Soviet Union. Microfilm of Disney’s futuristic “Tomorrowland.”