A real pisser of a national scandal

I predicted via Twitter four days ago that Rick Perry would soon announce he supports and encourages U.S. Marines who wish to urinate on slain and captured foes and anyone they suspect of looking even a little bit French.

Except for the part about the French, I was right on the money. The man who grew up partying at a camp called “Niggerhead,” said on Sunday, shucks, when a man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go.

“Obviously, 18- and 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that’s what happened here,” he said, adding the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode was -- surprise, surprise -- Obama opposed it.

Inflammatory stupidity is Perry’s knee-jerk reaction to any issue.

Or would it in this case be a jerk-off reaction?

Growing up in America, I never thought I’d evolve into the role of the nation’s moral conscience, but 9/11 and 10 endless years of war have thrown many more cerebral thinkers off kilter -- and don’t mistake my use of “cerebral thinkers” to conclude I’m referring to the current Texas governor (or the last one).

Now, let’s all pay attention: We’re the good guys. We don’t piss down on the dead. We lift up the living.

We’re the Berlin Airlift, The Peace Corp and The Marshall Plan.

The trade surplus of all that’s good that America’s given the world will never be exhausted. We gave the world the cure for polio, the iPhone and Bugs Bunny.

We’re Benjamin Franklin, Elvis Presley, and Arnold Palmer.

It wasn’t self-evident that all men were created equal until we said it was.

There’s never been a people more devoted to helping the helpless. We’re the nation of good intentions and there is tremendous value in that for people who like to travel around the world, walk into a strange place and say, “Hello! I’m an American!”

It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t so carelessly piss away.

A friend of mine said, “Strapping bombs to a kid and sending him into a crowd to murder innocents is fine for them to do, but it’s wrong for us to piss on dead terrorists?”

Well, yes, my friend, it is.

We do unto others as we’d have them do unto ourselves.

Notice, it’s not “we doo-doo unto others . . .”

Because there’s this: There are a lot of good men and women in harm’s way who joined the armed forces for the very reasons I mentioned. They want to help good people and kill bad ones.

They believe that stuff about winning hearts and minds. They are guys like Pat Tillman or guys who are inspired by guys like Pat Tillman.

And some of them are going to be captured and some of them are going to be killed.

For God’s sake, why would you do something that would put your buddies in any more jeopardy?

As justification for his pro-urination stance, the idiot Perry cited a picture of General George Patton “doing the same thing in the Rhine River.”

Here’s the obvious difference. Patton never did it on the body of a dead enemy; he did it on a body of water.

Like Patton and Winston Churchill, also cited by Perry for urinating on a German fortification, I’m a worldly man prone to enjoying a ceremonial pee.

I’ve peed in both American oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and leaked in great lakes named Michigan, Erie, Superior and, of course, the one pronounced “Urine.”

I’ve peed off a 7,000-foot Canadian Rocky precipice and once took a squirt from high atop Old Smokey. There’s something about peeing from a proud perch that always thrills men like me.

Maybe someday we’ll mature and give yodeling a shot, but for now that’s just the way we are.

But one perch from which you’ll never catch us tinkling is atop the moral high ground.

We understand what Perry and those four now-disgraced Marines do not: Pissing on anyone pisses off everyone.

That’s enough preaching from me for now.

I gotta go.

And rest assured, it’ll be someplace responsible.

Hank Jr., Rick Perry and redneck risings

I have a tanned friend with a white collar job at a green Orlando hotel who told me about the time Hank Williams Jr. talked to his black assistant with blue language that left him red faced.

“He was joking and the guy was giving it right back, but I was just hoping none of the guests heard the way he was talking,” he said.

He said he did everything but call him -- and I’m paraphrasing here -- his African American. He said Hank talked to him like it was still the ‘50s.

The 1850s.

I’m sure ol’ Hank songs have shook the walls at Niggerhead.

I wonder if anyone who was outraged by Natalie Maines’s gentle admission that she was ashamed George W. Bush was from Texas will tell Hank it’s time to shut up and sing instead of saying President Obama is the enemy because he’s like Adolph Hitler.

Executives at ESPN are right now weighing if it’s more profitable to alienate the 50 percent of the country who hates Barack Obama or the 50 percent who hate the people who hate Obama.

And I think my math is correct. There’s no longer any middle ground, is there?

I’d like to find and buy lunch for maybe the one person in the country who says, “You know, I don’t think he’s a bad guy or a Muslim or anything like that. I wish he could do something about the economy, but Congress won’t compromise with him. I’d like to see them stop trying score political points and start working together.”

To hell with lunch, I’d give him a campaign contribution.

I want Hank out. Now. Forever.

I don’t want to be sitting in a bar next Monday night and have Hank musically ask if I’m ready for some football and have it lead to another tedious political argument.

I can think of three bars in Nashville I could walk into right now where I could wing a shot glass and hit somebody who could write a rousing new anthem to a football contest less and less of America cares about.

I think a great compromise would be to get rid of Hank Jr. and get his son Hank III to write a new ditty. Hank III kicks ass.

And even pacifists like me enjoy a good ass kicking.

That’s one thing me and the boys at Niggerhead could agree upon. We all like to joke and fart and drink more than we should with loaded weapons lying all around -- and please don’t mistake that as a redundant shot at Dick Cheney.

Here’s where we differ.

If a popular and influential politician invites me to spend a guy weekend drinking and fishing at a place called Niggerhead, I don’t go.

What the bonehead pundits fail to understand is that owning a place called Niggerhead doesn’t hurt Rick Perry with his constituency.

It boosts him. It solidifies his base. He’s the redmeat guy the people who are driving the GOP want and, hell, if he uses a little colorful language that means he’s jus’ more like us.

The Republicans are absolutely crazy if they don’t nominate a middle-of-the-road business guy like Mitt Romney, but they won’t because right now they are absolutely crazy.

Here’s something no pollster in the world will tell you: Barack Obama is going to win a second term in an historic landslide.

All the reasonable pros in the Republican party -- Huckabee, Barbour and now Gov. Christie -- have sat this one out because they sense they aren’t extreme enough to win the nomination. And they know extreme won’t win a general presidential election.

Obama knew he couldn’t get anything done this term because he’d need cooperation from those opposed to his very existence. They say he’s a socialist, a Muslim. They say he wasn’t born here.

My hunch is he figured rather than risk failure after failure he’d do what he could and wait for the country to decide if it was really ready to follow a black man who’s qualified to lead.

What’s being decided isn’t the 2012 presidential election. This is the 2008 Part II without the moderating influence of a maverick McCain.

The Tea Party is bound and determined to make America choose between a black liberal and a white (Herman Cain doesn’t stand a chance) conservative.

But it’s not going to be your father’s conservative. It’s going to be a guy who denies global warming, will need to address racist and homophobic comments from the past, and claims Jesus as a political adviser.

They’re going to ask us to pick a redneck.

Well, fine then. I’m telling you right now America’s going to stick with the black neck.

Conservatives illuminating only own ignorance

I may not agree with all their wacky views, but I can understand conservatives getting in their typical purple-faced tizzies over things like gay marriage and keeping government out of our lives.

These are bedrock conservative issues.

Yes, the party that’s opposed to government intervention is ceaseless in its defense of personal liberty until it comes to issues like who’s rocking whose bed.

But when did conservatives become so opposed to conservation?

I’m, of course, referring to the latest conservative bogeyman, the compact fluorescent light bulb.

Conservatives say they are evil. They say they are destructive. They say they threaten the very fiber of American society.

It makes me nostalgic for days when they used to say things like that about Osama bin Laden.

Yes, these are dark days for light bulbs.

When I heard there was an innovative new light bulb that could save Americans on average $85 a month, I reacted the way an old conservative would have.

I thought, “This will let me conserve about $1,000 a year on electric bills.”

That I vowed to lavish the savings on donations to ultra-liberal organizations like the Sierra Club didn’t diminish the initial conservative motivation.

When exactly did the conservative movement begin to lose its mind?

The federal energy legislation that has them frothing was championed and signed by George W. Bush in 2007. It didn’t infuriate them then.

Was it when they were revealed to be so wrong about each and every aspect of the misguided $3 trillion Iraq War, the most costly and wasteful government program in American history?

Was it when they realized that eight years of conservative rule didn’t lead to panacea, but led instead to the election of America’s first black president, a man they despise?

The debt ceiling crisis has all the experts terrified -- and Michele Bachmann’s not an expert.

Not me.

Here’s what’s going the happen: Fiscally-minded grown ups of the conservative movement are going to begin exerting pressure to get a deal done. It’s already happening with Mitch McConnell.

Republican negotiators are going to cave because President Obama’s looking like the adult here.

Then Tea Party conservatives will do what they do best: They will become furious, only this time the sum of their wrath will be directed at inter-party allies.

That means the party will nominate the most extreme candidate from the most dysfunctional slate of presidential aspirants either party has ever considered.

The best candidate, the one who could engage voters from both parties, is Mitt Romney, a man so earnest he makes me wish I could get him drunk and passed out long enough to draw Sharpie eyebrows on his forehead before his next candidate debate.

But he’s a magic underpants-wearing Mormon and that won’t fly with primary voters in places like South Carolina.

If his complexion was just a shade darker they’d be demanding he produce his birth certificate.

That’s why I’m comfortable predicting the nominee will be reactionary Texas Governor Rick Perry. Yes, the man who recently mentioned seceding Texas from the union will soon be campaigning to run the country he considered abandoning.

Perry recently signed a law exempting Texas from the Bush energy and light bulb standards and is seeking manufacturers who -- yee! haw! -- come to Texas to open a plant making bulbs the old-fashioned Edison way.

The idea was mocked by Bob Keefe of the Natural Resources Defense Council that argues on behalf of conserving our resources.

“It’s pretty unlikely any manufacturers are going to be rushing to Texas to make a product based on technology that’s 125 years old, is highly inefficient and is something the majority of consumers have widely said they’d don’t want.”

He’s saying it’s not a very bright idea.

It’s just what we’ve come to expect from a movement that’s increasingly being led into the darkness by a bunch of inefficient dim bulbs.