Riding his dramatic Iranian breakthrough, President Obama aims to re-ignite his faltering presidency with a Christmas miracle. Interrupting the White House press briefing, Mr. Obama brashly challenged right wing nullification, calling for “a no-holds-barred summit to resolve the most serious and enduring threat to American prosperity: Tea Party Republicans.”
Mindful of past appeasement, Mr. Obama was resolute, like a war-president in the fight of his life:
The Tea Party may not yet boast nuclear centrifuges. But are its endlessly spinning subterfuges any less perilous, any less needy for exposure? My pledge against a nuclear Iran goes double for any insurgent group mounting a jihad against a functioning American government, our integrity and future. The last two years prove domestic combatants don’t need nukes to terrorize. I have no choice but use any means at my disposal to insure our security. So, I say: either we talk now or we talk later. Nothing, even drones, is off the table.
Discarding the gentleman’s code that sabotaged his first term, the president shockingly compared Tea Party and Iranian duplicity:
At the end of the day, tell me the great difference between calculated deception by Iran, with limited power or intention to do us injury, vs. the calculated deception by homemade upstarts with enormous leverage to do permanent damage? I can’t help but recall the best line that ever popped out of John Kerry’s mouth, his ’04 campaign aside, ‘This is the crookedest, lyingest bunch I have ever seen.’ Would that notorious Nobel Peace Prize be worth much if I damped down foreign wars but let an internal war against America rage on?
Referencing unending GOP sabotage of his presidency, Mr. Obama was unstoppable:
Time to admit we’ve been slugged by an undeclared House impeachment. Worse still, I was convicted and sent to the tower without getting a defense. And that, don’t we know, offends Constitutional protections. Look, if we can start to corral Iran’s nukes, why not Tea Party gridlock that hurts everyone? Maybe ‘wild and crazy’ worked for the ’12 GOP primary but fake umbrage is not governance. If the right wants politics as trench warfare, let’s force the issue and show what majority rule means. Our future, if not that of civilization, depends on the outcome.
The Outrage of Murdoch Minor
In a flash, FOX News’ Murdoch Minor leapt his feet, outraged any foreign-born president dare call glorious patriots “outsiders” or equate them with terrorist “Iranian madmen.” Patiently, Mr. Obama said House radicals weren’t “outsiders in the space alien sense, but what kind of inhumane leader kicks his neighbor when they’re down? That corrodes national unity, just like Romney’s dismissal of the 47%. Except now it’s closer to 67%. GOP obsession with cutting taxes and Food Stamps, or demonizing basic support services, makes GOP officials come across as outsiders looking in. I am hardly alone in judging anti-government nullifiers as the greatest threat to the American way of life.”
“Stunned into silence” captures the impact on hardened journalists. One staunch liberal had to be helped back onto his chair, slack-jawed. Another broke the silence, “but, Mr. President, why now? Isn’t gridlock unfixable?” “If we can make peace with fearsome Iran,” he asked, “why not with fearsome Republicans? Just like corporations, my friend, they are people too, and some still have souls. If we can break bread with far-off, angry religious ideologues, why not hometown, angry political ideologues? I admit to an epiphany: what do we have to lose? Can this national stalemate get staler?”
The president then conceded he was first shaken, then inspired by Pope Francis’ outspoken indictment against the “new tyranny” of “unfettered capitalism.”
Not only Catholics should work to change this stark reality. What president wants to leave office aware he oversaw what Francis called ‘an economy of exclusion’? Nothing like having leaders around immune from impeachment or re-election backlash. Like the Dalai Lama, this pontiff is a spiritual voice of good will without self-serving motives. Do nothing, and the future indicts us for ignoring crony capitalism and hard prices we all pay, in mortality and lost opportunities. In sum, I concluded I have three years to go and nothing to lose. A new era, maybe a new legacy, is at hand and I now embrace it.
Then, the president turned, deflected questions, and bounded away, chuckling, according to unconfirmed reports.
Palin Slams Pope, Again
In an oddly related story linking the Pope with the Tea Party, Sarah Palin has apparently reneged on her apology after belittling the Pope for sounding “kind of liberal.” An unnamed party source confirmed receiving a slurred, midnight call from the failed V.P. nominee. She was irate, complaining she was bamboozled into backing off:
Boy, was I right or what? This supposed “good shepherd’ of the sect, which I should point out right now my forebears rejected, is no liberal but a downright, radical commie belching Marxism. You betcha.
I couldn’t believe the Pope defends lazy poor people while putting down our top business geniuses, who deserve all the billions they’ve earned. Why, his ‘idolatry of money’ line sounds sacrilegious to this entrepreneur. Need I remind this left wing agitator who sends more cash idolatry to Rome than anyone else? Right, rich American Catholics. Aren’t all those millions, like from Joe Kennedy, now dirty money, the offspring of ‘unfettered tyranny’? How then can the holy Roman church get off not being complicit in such ‘tyranny’?
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she rattled on, “if this pontiff came out for global health care, or other giveaways to goof-offs. Silly me, I thought sloth one of the Seven Deadly Sins? Right, let’s treat losers just like layabout, jobless monks loafing in monasteries. Hey, Mr. Pope, why not auction off priceless, museum trinkets, bribes from potentates trying to buy their way to heaven? No evangelical minister on my Christmas card list wouldn’t gag when the pontiff serves up ‘widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion.’ Thus guy kills me, punting to what God made impossible, ‘Money must serve, not rule.’ Say what? If God didn’t want rich people, why did He motivate capitalists to accumulate vast treasures?”
The Vatican made no official response but an unnamed senior cleric commented such holy rollers are precisely the wicked defenders of corrupt capitalism that fit the Holy Father’s caution. Who better than this Palin creature exemplifies Francis’ words, how the ‘thirst for power and possessions knows no limits’? Francis nailed these errant Christians ‘locked up in small things’ and ‘obsessed’ with issues such as gay marriage and abortion? Call me next week when the Holy Father comes out against usury, just like the old days.”
• Nod to satirists Mark Twain, Andy Borowitz, and Jim Hightower.