Tweets, chicken hawks, heroes

Columns

March 15, 2013

Tweets, chicken hawks, heroes

By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Fri Mar 15, 2013, 07:00 AM CDT

PICAYUNE — The day the retired pope gave his last tweet, I was captive in the car for seven hours. I heard a lot of radio news, or what passes.

First I listened to my usual National Public Radio allotment, and it seemed rather like a slow news day. No marauding shooters were abroad, no wars were started and nobody but the outgoing pope tweeted anything of importance.

Something perverse in me wanted to hear the Other Side. So I tuned in briefly to the Radio Right to hear what theme the neocons chose for the day. As usual, life was a box of chocolates, most of them nut-centered.

Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense was being decried, mostly because he prefers negotiation to shooting from the hip with drones. As columnist Donald Kaul wrote, “The chicken hawks are out in force.”

Hagel, in case you’ve been in a cave, is a former Republican senator from Nebraska, fairly conservative, but restrained when it comes to waging war. That is perhaps because — unlike so many of his critics — he has been in one. A decorated Vietnam veteran, he’s not so eager to march young men and women into war’s hellish canyon. Dwight Eisenhower was exactly the same, not to mention Georges Washington and McGovern.

Hagel’s nomination process lasted two months, long enough to get ugly. That vicious typist Ann Coulter even reprised a mindless 2002 neocon attack on Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, the former senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam but got beaten by Republican Saxby Chambliss. The Republican’s ads questioned Cleland’s patriotism.

Some of us fair-minded enough to think giving two legs and an arm for your country is enough still remember that travesty. Chambliss, like his hero Dick Cheney, didn’t go to war. He obtained draft deferments, though not as many as Cheney.

Coulter was angry because Cleland spoke well of Hagel. She assessed Cleland’s courage this way: “He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix.”

In actuality, Cleland was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action at Khe Sanh, a fierce battle that raged four days before the explosion that cost him his limbs.

On another Radio Right channel, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer was taking credit for ruining JC Penney with his group’s boycott of the chain that dared hire Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman. He beat that homophobic drum awhile, then took time to agree with a caller who said Obamacare would not provide health care for anyone 70 or older.

Then on the air was Mike Huckabee, the other former governor from Hope, Ark., who seemed uncharacteristically concerned about a reporter, of all things. Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward claims he has been “threatened” by the Obama administration over his sequester reporting, and Huckabee suddenly is concerned about the Fourth Estate.

While I think it’s certainly a bad thing when politicians try to intimidate reporters, it happens every day. I figure Bob Woodward isn’t all that worried about his job or reputation.

I don’t know of a working reporter who hasn’t been “threatened” by some hollering political dog bitten by copy. There’s always someone trying to get a newspaper person fired for telling the truth. It’s part of the job description.

But how nice that Mister Huckabee is concerned.

(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)

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Columns

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
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