No. 1: Joe Paterno
Why didn’t he quit, or why wasn’t he shown the door, several years ago? As it is, he remained the face of Penn State during the worst big-time-college-football, sex-abuse scandal in history, as far as I can tell.
If he had quit several years ago, the backlash from the scandal (including his failure to alert authorities to an assistant coach sexually assaulting a young boy in the showers) would not have caught him full blast. He might well have slipped to second-rung culprit and undoubtedly would have been remembered in more glowing terms by the general public.
So, why did he stay on? You know why — EGO! Now he’s dead and gone and not many people outside of State College, PA, care.
No. 2: Kansas City Manager Troy Schulte.
In his 2012-2013 budget proposal last week, Schulte recommended reducing the Fire Department by 105 positions. The justification? Fire calls have dropped dramatically in the past decade. How would the estimated $7.6 million in savings be used? To give other city employees raises.
Only Schulte, who doesn’t have to stand for election, would dare propose something that dramatic. And, trust me, even he doesn’t believe it will happen. He might be hoping that the council — most of whose members won with backing from the fire fighters’ union — will approve a cut of somewhere between 10 and 20 firefighters. That’s about the best he can hope for, at least until there’s a real budget crisis, which probably is coming within five years. At that point, we’ll probably see a “hatchet council,” which will have no choice but to fire a lot of employees or see the city go broke.
No. 3: David Brooks
One of my favorite op-ed columnists veered off track last week, when he wrote about Mitt Romney having made a fortune because he was “a worker and a grinder.” Brooks proceeded to trace the family background of Romney, a Mormon.
A central figure in the family history is Romney’s great-grandfather, Miles Romney. Brooks recounts the journeys and travails of Miles Romney and “his three wives and their many children” like he’s talking about an everyday, conventional, American family. Mitt might come be a hard worker who comes from sturdy stock, but when someone starts talking casually about a candidate’s great-grandfather’s “three wives and many children,” my attention naturally shifts from the up-from-the-bootstraps story to, “Did you say three wives?”
No. 4: Newt Gingrich
It’s unnerving that a fat guy with a phony, adultery-abetting wife can catapult to victory in a state — even a mostly irrelevant, backasswards state like South Carolina — by attacking the “elite news media”; the “elites in New York and Washington”; and “the most effective food-stamp president in history.”
It’s promoting class warfare, with the goal of rallying hourly wage-earners and unemployed people to take up arms against the so-called “elites?” But who would really benefit under Newt’s scenario? The true “elites,” the one percenters.
No. 5: Thomas L. Friedman
I want to end on a hopeful note…
Perhaps the most incisive op-ed person in the opinion business, wrote in Sunday’s New York Times about what kind of candidate he would like to vote for.
It would be a candidate who:
“…advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade American for the 21st century…and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.”
A candidate who…
“…is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.”
A candidate who…
“…has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget.”
And, finally, a candidate who…
“…supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money is politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery.”
Friedman concluded: “I hope it is Obama, because I agree with him on so many other issues. But if it’s Romney, he’d deserve to win. And, if by some miracle, both run that campaign, and the 2012 contest is about two such competing visions, then put every dollar you own in the U.S. stock market. It will go up a gazillion points.”
Happy days could be here again, if only Abe Lincoln was reincarnated.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
It is University Park, Pa. College Station is in Texas. Talking about should have retired years ago…
Thanks, John. You’re right about the mailing address (and I was completely wrong about College Station — sorry, A&M), but see Les Weatherford’s comment below.
If the city manager is going to save 7.6 million, he should use it to help with the sewer and water upgrade instead of giving the dept heads more money. As far as the fire dept laying off 105 employees, I doubt it very seriously because the city council don’t have the balls to stand up to the fire dept. After all, they haven’t done that in the last 35 years.
And so it is, Jack. Thanks for the comment.
(Readers, Mr. Koontz was the best, and most colorful, maintenance man the city ever had. Now retired, like me, he is free to dispense advice liberally to his former employer.)
Fitz, your Newt comment overlooks, imo, some real time truths.
“It’s promoting class warfare, with the goal of rallying hourly wage-earners and unemployed people to take up arms against the so-called “elites?” But who would really benefit under Newt’s scenario? The true “elites,” the one percenters.”
One Percenters explained here-
http://www.alternet.org/economy/152601/5_facts_you_should_know_about_the_wealthiest_one_percent_of_americans/?page=entire
True enough to a certain point, however, there are good reasons for class warfare and the unspoken premise, that the the “99%,” with the correct information and guidance, would be in lockstep off to the tennis courts on their way to the Bastille might be a stretch.
The one percenters, personified by grasping Machiavellian scum like Lloyd Blankfein and companies like Goldman Sachs (I realize that Fannie and Freddie policy wonks started it all, but the enthusiasm of Wall Street brahmins who finished off the American economy from 2006 to 2008 like piranhas on meth deserve the lion’s share of credit), are not going to kick your ass when you go out to warm up your car, or rape and kill your grandmother.
If something evil is this way coming, it is more likely going to be a six-time violent offender who lost his EBT card and is going to give you an extemporaneous ass-kicking on his way to the liquor store, than a Mission Hills Venture Capital guy with a six-car car garage and a wife named Muffy.
While the 1%ers indefatigably raid more and more of the country’s wealth by way of Mitt Romney’s 15%er tax breaks and we Americans slide closer and closer to a Third World existence, the imminent threat is not only from the economic 1%er cancer that kills our pocketbooks, but the exponentially increasing entitled class that lives off of guilt and transgenerational claims to our treasure and blood, and I mean blood literally.
Smartman was right the other day when he claimed that real ignorance is personified by those folks who refuse to believe that ALL of the media lies to we plebes in order to manipulate our vote, pocketbooks and the zeitgeist.
While I do believe that oligarchs, plutocrats and kleptocrats wish to keep our Orwellain mind set intact, the proximity of the closer threat, to the dwindling middle class, is the media’s apotheosis of diversity and multiculturalism, which, imo, give credence to the “American Suicide” theories posited by my guy Pat Buchanan.
Class warfare is an “ad hoc” necessity employed by most folks in their day to day lives, in order to literally keep living day to day. Physical violence perpetuates the truth, not the myth of the struggle for that ever more elusive American Dream.
The media’s lies about violence and why that violence is visited upon so many working class folks who are paying taxes, voting and living their lives, is not in any way lost on the folks who are lied to.
Therein lies Mitt and Newt’s ability to motivate we hoi polloi, who on the face of it would have nothing in common with landed gentry in ivory towers.
This won’t turn out well.
The only individual on the face of the earth who is capable of responding to that screed (have a cold beverage, Chuck) is the widely beloved Hubartos vanDrehl, the Prince of Paonia, the Mystic of the Mountains.
Oh, prince, if you can hear me from the Western Slope, where the water runs clear and the cattle graze contentedly (until that fateful moment when they begin the transition to fine hamburger), give our pea-brain minds the benefit of your guidance on these matters that flummox our mighty nation.
News reports are datelined “STATE COLLEGE, Pa.”
Your blog is required reading around here, Fitz.
Thanks, Les. Good to hear from you, and I hope you’re doing well.
The precise location of the school is a bit of a puzzlement. Like you say, the dateline is State College, PA, although John Rubisch (see above) notes that the mailing address is University Park, PA.
I had changed it to University Park, but I’m going with the advice of a former ace, Kansas City Star copy editor. So, State College it will be…
One thing is clear: I need to enroll in copy verification classes.
Fitz, no less noble an American than P.T. Barnum explained it all. “There’s a sucker born every minute” and “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
Generally, people are stupid. People that report on people sometimes are stupider. People that read, and believe, the stuff that people who report on people report tend to be the stupidest. I think Bill Maher is on the record with something similar.
I think I follow your drift there, Smartman…When it comes to suckers, though, I’m of the opinion that the Republican school of thought, essentially, is “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.”
(Credit W.C. Fields for the meat of the comment, although Fields himself, I suspect, was a Republican.)
Fitz, I believe it was WC Fields that said, ” I would not belong to any club that would have me as a member.”. I think that makes him a libertarian just like Chuck and me.
I just Googled it, Smartman, and it was Groucho who came up with that memorable line. Yet, if I had to guess, I’d put him in the Republican column, too.
Checking Google for political quotations from W.C. Fields, I found this one…
“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.”
Hey, Jim, the Star could’ve used that former ace Star copy editor last night when it was placing the AP story about the retiring Arizona congresswoman on the paste-up screen, as it twice tells readers that she is a Democrat. Once is never enough, right? The scary part of the story is the mention further on of the accused shooter being forcibly medicated at a federal prison in Missouri (Springfield, I believe) to better prepare him for the upcoming trial. Mmm. Doesn’t quite sound like that “prison” in Florida where former Missouri Speaker Bob Griffin did some time, what with him being allowed to play a little tennis and golf now and then.
Correction noted!
It’s time for us all to get past the Democrat and Republican labels. Harry Truman would no more be a democrat today than Charles Bronson would be a lesbian.
I think the basic question that most people have to ask is whether government is the problem or the solution, which isn’t even a democrat versus republican issue any more.
I’ll correct myself by saying that the congresswoman is not retiring but rather resigning from office, and the Smartman’s point regarding party labels, for what they’re worth, is well taken.
Dear JimmyC,
Your latest blog (I hate using computerspeak!) landed in my spam file, which I usually dump without reading. By the time I realized where you were ending up, there were 15 responses, meaning that it’s been out a while so nobody is reading it any more. Better wait for better opportunities in the future to comment on our DEADDEADDEAD political and communication systems.
I repeat: The only people who run for office in our broken system and can get elected are those assholes we all hated in high school and never wanted to see again afterwards.
I hate politics so much that your heavy and wasteful financial involvement in segregated K.C., Mo.’s recent mayoral election qualifies you, in my book, to be put over someone’s knee and have your prostate checked with a meat hook. I’m sure your lovely wife would like to provide and apply the meat hook.
I Remain,
The Lesser Of Most Evils,
Hubartos vanDrehl
While this is not exactly the enlightenment I was hoping for from the insightful vanDrehl, “it is what it is,” as the great pundits say.
I must say, Hubartos, that I am deeply insulted by your comment that because there have already been about 15 comments, “nobody is reading it any more.” Believe me, there are hundreds (well, at least dozens) of people out there who have yet to find their way to JimmyCsays today.
State College is the town. University Park is the campus.
It’s good to get that sorted out. Thanks for the clarification.