The death of Whitney Houston struck me with the same small, quiet desolation I felt when Karen Carpenter died in 1982. Such enormously talented, beautiful women succumbing to the toxic inner demons that were at once invisible, but also gigantically real.

How could the folks around these ladies not see the approaching train wreck, how could they not have been whisked off the squirrel-cage of celebrity life, and rescued by a contented quietude? Why are there so many amazing stories of American success in the pop entertainments that end in such heart-breaking squalor? Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Michael Jackson, Cass Eliot, Hank Williams, Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Keith Whitely and on and on and on…

Whitney Houston’s heartbreaking demise brings up so many unaccountable questions. But, I am reminded of a quick tale that Mark Steyn had once told about his only encounter with Ms. Houston. I paraphrase, but the gist was that Steyn had been a guest speaker at an event that also featured some sort of an appearance by Houston, and he found himself briefly alone with her on the far side of a security cordon. Awaiting her arrival on the far side of the street was a dense sea of her entourage, and various other groupies and hangers-on.  In the few words they exchanged, Steyn was struck by how empty and souless her existence seemed, even then. There was no one nearby they cared about her, there was only a vast throng of media and entertainment parasites hoping to get their daily piece of her.

Finally, in the end, she was utterly, utterly consumed.

Why does this happen, seemingly so often, to such gifted folks? And why do others seem to escape it?

For an insight, consider Connie Smith..

Connie Who?

Dolly Parton once famously quipped: “There are only three lady singers: Barbara Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, and Connie Smith. All the rest of us are just pretending.”

Connie Smith began a remarkable Country Music career in the mid-1960′s, after “Whisperin’” Bill Anderson heard Smith sing at a local hoe-down talent show in southern Ohio. Anderson quickly arranged to have some demo recordings made of Connie, and within months, she’d been signed to RCA’s Nashville branch by none other than Chet Atkins himself.

To this day, Connie Smith’s recording of Anderson’s “Once a Day” remains the longest chart-topping debut single, staying at Number One on Billboard’s Hot Country chart for over 8 weeks. In less than a year, Smith had been launched from complete Ohio Hill-Jack obscurity to Country Music Super-Stardom. In this sense, Connie Smith’s trajectory was much the same as Whitney Houston’s: Young, extremely gifted, and groomed by the top talents in the field. From 1964 until 1967, Connie Smith was the reigning Queen of the “Nashville Sound”, and charted over 12 Top Ten hits, and she continued with couple dozen Top 40 hits right through the early 1970′s.

Soon, Connie was all over the place: Television appearances, the Grand Ole Opry, movies, the works. Everybody, everywhere, seemed to be grabbing at little pieces of her amazingly bright star.

But, something happened on the way to Connie Smith’s Whitney Houston-like rendezvous with destiny: The dizzying pace, the money, the fame, fell away as thoughts of loneliness and desolation (and suicide) began to creep in, and Connie consciously backed away. Having been raised a Christian, like Houston, she instead leaned more heavily into her Christian faith, eventually becoming a Born Again evangilical in the early 1970′s. She started insisting that she be allowed to record Gospel and Christian-themed music, and was even threatened with expulsion from the Grand Ole Opry for making extensive evangelical entreaties during her performances.

But, by then, she had her God, her faith, her family, and all the other trappings seemed small and unimportant. The hole in her heart of seeming emptiness and despair was filled with God, and Connie Smith finally stepped away entirely from the entertainment industry while raising her family, only occasionally venturing out to sing for charity work, or as a guest on some other artist’s recordings.

Connie Smith is recognized by most Country Music artists and critics as probably the most gifted and overlooked voice talent in the history of the genre. She is regarded by many as the inheritor of Patsy Cline’s mantle, for her heartfelt voicing interpretations, her range, and her emotion. In this realm, Connie Smith’s voice belongs to the same incomparable category as Whitney Houston’s.

Of course, Smith’s life had its storms, it’s challenges. But, Connie Smith knew to whom she ultimately belonged.

She’s been married four times. Most were quick fizzles, and after her third marriage disintegrated in the late 1980′s, Smith swore she’d never marry again. But, she tried again in 1997, marrying singer/songwriter Marty Stuart. He summed up Connie Smith’s career, and the success of their partnership and marriage. It is a stark contrast to so many other bright lights that zoom across the firmament of America’s pop pantheon, and fade away in sordid and heartbreaking ends.

Says Stuart:

“…Keep the Lord the center … and commit.”

Let’s Move! says Michelle Obama.

Yes– why don’t you?

Say, back to Rezko Acres? After all, it’s a great “Buyer’s Market” now, here in 2012. I’m quite certain we can find a nice, 12,000-square foot mansion and compound for you and the fam’ , commensurate with your newly-acquired tastes –for a third the price it might have been before your husband entered office. Ah, yes: “Affordable Housing”, here in the Age of Obama. A quick scan of the local foreclosure notices ought to turn up something…

Yes, by all means, Mrs. Obama: Move. And, as luck would have it, there are millions of folks, many of them with pick-up trucks, cargo vans and trailers, who would love to help you. We’ll even bring a refrigerator dolly, boxes, and packing tape. We’ll even eat your stupid veggie pizza if we have to, while we lovingly pack the china.

Move out of the White House, move away from Washington. Move back to Chicago.

Move the heck away from my face.

“Let’s Move!”

From the diaries…

We had a smallish political brush-fire here in Michigan in 1982.

The grizzled old William Milliken had finally decided that 124 terms was enough as Governor, and he was hanging up the cleats.

Jim Blanchard, a weirdo Democrat downriver Detroit Big Labor congressman decided he would run, as did a few other miscreants from the Democrat party. Even the benighted John Conyers toyed with the idea, until someone pointed it out to the congressman that if he were elected Governor, he’d actually have to LIVE in Michigan, and to heck with that.

On the Republican side, all the usual suspect lined up: Jim Brickley, Bill Milliken’s lieutenant governor, filed early. Robert Tisch (a proto-Tea Partier if there ever was one, and a bit of a strangenheimer in his own right), the Shiawasee County Drain Commissioner– jumped into the race , as did several earnest, yet stilted, go-along republican state legislators. And finally, Richard Headlee, the founder of the Alexander Hamilton Life Insurance company, threw his hat in the ring.

Read More →

As a Michigander, George Romney looms large here in the political Pantheon. He was the last Governor of Michigan to serve under the pre-1964 Constitution (with its 2-year gubernatorial terms), and the first to serve under the new. He was serving in the bright sunshine of Michiganian Greatness, himself coming into the government only after creating American Motors Corporation in 1955 with the merger of Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson Motors and a Fourth automobile manufacturer to compete with The Big Three. Romney in the late 1950′s had the same broad shoulders that his home state had.

Think of George Romney as the Lee Iaccoca of the 1950′s: Rushed in to save an industry, turned it around, and became a Prophet of American Free Enterprise.

The accolades poured over George Romney like a refreshing rain in a parched land, and he lapped them up, finally becoming governor of Michigan in 1962. After fourteen years of democratic dominance under Soapy Williams and John Swainson, Romney was seen as a Pied Piper of Republicanism, especially in the teeth of the JFK ascendency.

Like his son nearly 50 years later, George also went to great lengths to at once  ingratiate himself to the New Frontier and to distance himself from conservatives. At one point, when he was pressed about the depths of his commitment to conservatism and if he supported Barry Goldwater, he responded “you know darned well I’m not!”

Of course, it didn’t hurt that George had standard-issue Executive Style Salt and Pepper Hair, and a jutting lantern jaw. He was the very vision (caricature?) of governmental leadership.  Of course, one of the warning flags about Romney’s governmental leadership skills sould have been his choice of Traverse City trust-fund boy and limp-spined moderate William Milliken as his Lieutenant Governor.

During his gubernatorial tenure, George Romney went on to massively increase state spending, and bulked up on the largest State spending spree for real property ever seen– before, or since. He bloated the social welfare agencies, and helped write into law that any state divided highway constructed at the time had to conform to the horrendously expensive interstate specifications –but without the federal government picking up the massively increased costs.But, it was the Go-Go 1960′s, so revenue was pouring into Lansing, and, unlike Swainson, Romney was running a surplus.

Thus, Romney found himself in genuine contention for the 1968 GOP Presidential Nomination, at least according to the Harris and Gallup Polls. So much so that, in late 1966, he ventured to South East Asia to get a first-hand look at the Vietnam conflict to brush up a bit on his foreign affairs bona-fides (certainly, the fever swamps of Vietnam weren’t the first vacation choice for a Michigan governor).  Romney came back and pronounced the war a just and honorable pursuit.

But, several months later, with the backlash against the war heating up, and President Johnson taking increasing heat from his own left flank, suddenly, George Romney got religion on the Vietnam War. During the late summer of 1967, (indeed, after the disastrous Detroit Riots), George Romney declared on a local Detroit radio station that, in those first days after he’d returned from the war zone in 1966 he’d “.. just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get!” from the Military Brass. The war, in George Romney’s view, was no longer worth fighting

It was a poor choice of words, especially in the wake of the Manchurian Candidate. It also was a ham-handed play into the leftist RFK narrative that the Vietnam War was immoral, and that it was only being fought to advance the profits of the Military Industrial Complex.

Who in the world would want to have a President that could be “brainwashed”? As it turns out, very few people; Romney’s presidential hopes and ambitions flowed out as quickly as they’d flowed in.

Richard Nixon went on the receive the Republican Nomination in a cake-walk in the high summer of 1968. George went on to serve as Nixon’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary  –an odd choice, given the smoldering ruins in Detroit, but, no matter…

Today, we have now been treated to the verbal acuity of Mitt Romney –the acorn not falling, evidently, very far from the Coach-leather upholstered tree– and to the live prospect of a president that isn’t “concerned about the very poor. They have a safety net”. He says he also isn’t concerned about the very rich, either.

I think Mitt Romney’s been, to borrow a phrase: “Brainwashed”.

It is a devastating comment, for it illustrates not only the live prospect of a GOP standard-bearer that can self-destruct at a moment’s notice (which is the rap against Newt), but it also betrays a mind-set that borrows heavily from Barack Obama’s striated world-view that sees permanent classes in America: Ones that stay permanently cemented in place, and that need –or don’t need– bread and circuses from the beneficent government.

It is a comment that reveals further a world-view in which Mitt Romney was born and bred: One in which the wealthy are born wealthy, expect the privileges of wealth to be borne out in perpetuity, and one in which the very poor remain very poor, and the only thing they need or require is a properly mended safety-net.

What humbug. What a devastating Float in the Carnival Parade of Bunkum, as Mencken might describe it.

Mitt deserves the brooming I believe is coming for this extraordinarily revealing and idiotic comment. It belongs on the trophy shelf of stupidity right next to Michael Dukkakis’s Photo in the Tank, Edmund Muskie’s tears in New Hampshire, Gary Hartpences’ “Monkey Business”, and Gerald Ford’s comment that “there is no Soviet Domination in Eastern Europe”. It betrays a way of thinking that is aloof, detached, entitled, pedantic and stupid. And, my sense is, there’s a lot more where that comes from, and it will come pouring out in the next week. But, the damage is done, thankfully, before there is a nominee.

George Romney was brainwashed. I think Mitt’s was dry-cleaned.

Iowa seems a generation ago, doesn’t?

Remember? Gingrich was toast, Ron Paul was “fading”, and Rick Santorum was “coming on strong” in the final polls before the actual voting began….

And these final Polling Prognostications?

Romney, 22.1%, Paul, 19.5%, Santorum 17%, Gingrich, 12%

Of course, this was all it took to officially proclaim the Inevitable Romney as the Crown Prince of Frontrunnerdom. The final poll mattered more than the actual results, which had Santorum a scosh north of 24%, Romney 34 votes behind him, and Ron Paul checking in with 18%.

Ah, yes, the margin of error.

What I would give to outlaw polling, and allow candidates to rise and fall on their merit….  Now, because of the endless polling, sampling and focus-grouping, we are treated to this Romney-Ignited vicious, vile, disgusting, foul cock-fight of a campaign that is primarily about poll-jockeying, and destroying whoever is in front of the Mittster. Romney can’t run on his political philosophy –at best, he’s a social-climbing technocrat of no particular political stripe, at worst a mealy-mouthed East-Coast patrician good-government liberal– and thus, he must catastrophically smear and destroy his closest poll-buddy. If Mother Theresa herself was leading Mitt Romney in the Florida Poll, he’d spend the Queen’s Dowry to electorally butcher her.

What an asinine way to choose the person that will save this country from the abyss. Thanks, Mitt.

Just remember what the final poll was before Iowa, too…

If you view this election as simply about stopping President Obama, then, by all means: Vote for Mitt Romney.

If, on the other hand, you understand clearly that this election is the most important in our lifetime, then you have no choice. You must vote for Newt.

Yeah, yeah, I get it: Newt Gingrich is a fat old white guy, given to fits of uncontrolled verbosity, and is encumbered with an erratic, undisciplined mind. That’s the rap, isn’t it? Newt is “undisciplined”, and “erratic”, right?

Straight out of Alinsky: Name your enemy, personalize him, stigmatize him, destroy him. So far, so good: Newt, the thrice-married erratic adulterer of monumental grandiosity, swaggering off between sexual and oratorical conquests, drunk on his own image. Who could vote for such a deviant?

Anyone who loves their country, and doesn’t want to see it die by a thousand cuts (or, perhaps better, $70,000,000,000,000 unfunded mosquito bites), that’s who.

Mitt Romney, by contrast, is a fine American, an upstanding member of his church, a swell business-man. But, so was Jimmy Carter on all of these accounts, too. (-Whom, it should be noted, was also a one-term Governor, ruling against the political tides of his own state, and, upon reading the tea-leaves there after one term, chose not to seek another.)

Maybe Romney can beat Obama. The drunken hardware-store owner in my little hamlet here in the north-woods could probably beat Obama, too. This is no particular talent. By the time October 28th rolls around, I figure the guy with the big blue ‘n white jet, the presidential ball-retriever and the big ears will be about as popular as a Nirvana CD at the Masonic Home. Obama is toast, electorally. So, that Mitt Romney can beat Obama isn’t relevant, in my view.

Mitt Romney personifies everything that’s been wrong with the GOP for my entire life: They are oftentimes petty and thin-skinned. They believe whole-heartedly in a monied political primogeniture. They have an inferiority complex that makes the weak and expedient seem strong and nimble. The same insider-establishment types that are offering up Mitt Romney are the same ones that are currently giving us exemplary steely-eyed leadership of John Boehnor and Mitch McConnell, and who in the past gave us Dick Darman (with his grand advice to George HW Bush to wave a fat middle finger to his “no new taxes pledge”) and John Sununu (who gave us the brilliant legal mind of David Suter). Their lives are given to spasmodic, reflexive political calculation, at the expense of governmental leadership. They are embarrassed by wage-earners who go to church and actually believe what they hear sitting in the pews. They are utterly disconnected from those they seek to govern. Worse, they take conservatives for granted, and at the same time have absolutely no curiosity about what conservatism actually is, or why it is so animating to such a huge block of their own voters.

Newt Gingrich has been a lousy husband. As luck would have it, though, he’s not running to be my husband. He’s also been a ham-handed political grifter, making whoopie with Nancy on the loveseat. Well, now, given the expansiveness of the man’s erroneous zones, there was probably more going on there on that casting couch than melting a few polar ice-caps, if you get my drift. But, none of this matters.

Only ONE THING matters:

Mitt Romney will not “repeal” Obamacare. He won’t. He’s lying through his teeth, and I think most people sense this.

He will “offer” waivers to all 50 states the day he enters the Oval Office.

Uh-huh. Sure thing…

And, I’ll bet Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo and the phalanx of whacked-out lib Governors will hustle into line to grab up those “waivers” (assuming, of course, that it’s even legal for the President to “offer waivers” to a duly passed law of the United States). And there, the day AFTER he enters the Oval Office, Obamacare will be forever cemented into the American way of life, and on that day it will be:

Game Over.

No, Mitt Romney will buckle– he will have to, and he’ll stand there with that pearlescent smile explaining that he signed Romneycare into law in the compassionate and good-government hope that we could extend affordable health-care to everyone– and in so doing, accepting the Utopian fantasy that such things are not only good, but achievable– and that he wants to extend the same good intentions to the nation as a whole, and will therefore only TWEAK Obamacare, and save “the good parts”.

There are no good parts. None. But, that won’t matter.

Repeal legislation has already passed the House. It will pass a Republican-led Senate, and, if we don’t have a filibuster-proof Senate, too bad: Harry Reid paved the way earlier in this Senate term by nuking the filibuster rules, so, we now have a steam-roller provision. And if there was ever a time to invoke such a precedent, it would be in brooming every last vestige of this stinking pile of tyranny.

WHICH WON’T HAPPEN UNDER A ROMNEY PRESIDENCY. Think about it, folks.

Newt Gingrich already knows where the bathrooms are in the Capitol. He knows how legislation is passed, and he knows how it is passed quickly. He knows the byzantine legislative process. And, he knows where all the bodies are buried that make the arm-twisting needed for the fights ahead that much less combative.

And, most importantly, Newt Gingrich has been a CONSERVATIVE longer than Mitt Romney’s been a precious “businessman”. And, Newt Gingrich, it should be noted, has been a “businessman” for as long as Mitt Romney’s been a conservative, however putative.  Mitt Romney has done nothing for the conservative movement, except harpoon it’s most effective arguments, and it’s more aggressive and thoughtful leaders. He has consistently rejected conservatism. Yes, Mitt Romney is a fine Citizen, and a model Republican.

But, for the future of this nation, for the sake of your kids, your grandkids, and the very nature and future of this great country, we don’t merely need a Republican. We need a Conservative.

And, that conservative is Newt Gingrich.

My older brother Brian was a fanatic for the Apollo Program.

By day, he’d deliver the Lansing State Journal, and by night he’d assemble plastic Revell models of the Apollo Eleven Saturn V rocket, complete with gantry and launchpad. I was only six years old then, so let me tell you: My brothers models were awe-inspiring. Michelangelo himself never created anything so magical.

Brian also had a big black and white wall-poster of the Lunar Module, inscribed with the Volkswagen logo and the adage: “It’s Ugly, But It Gets You There”. By the time Apollo 11 blasted off in the high summer of 1969, my brother had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey an easy half-dozen times.

All these years later, it is difficult to imagine mainstream culture that celebrated with such wild abandon the technological superiority of America, and held up as heroes the scientists and he-man astronauts that took us to the moon. The visages of these men, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were everywhere, smiling, smiling, wearing their Ban-Lon shirts and zooming about in their Corvettes.

The Future was everywhere. There was very little concern in those days that we would offend anyone by putting three white guys on the moon (well, two guys, and one circling it)–no, they were Americans, and that was enough.

And there was absolutely no mention anywhere that the bugs and wildlife and environment were disturbed, either at “Cape Kennedy” — as Cape Canavaral was called in those heady day– or the surface of the moon itself. We landed there, we walked all over, leaving our footprints, dust and debris. Then, after a few hours, we left, and our Astronauts splashed down safely in the South Pacific. And the space age reached its glorious zenith. Yes, we looked to the future with relish and excited anticipation. We spent no time marinating in the false pieties and self-conscience wailing about how much America sucked.

In the summer of 1969, America was great: Live with it.

The foul 1960′s, with their eruptive violence, discordant culture and mind-boggling war, was receding into memory, giving way to a land of high-gloss white thermoplastic furniture, Tang, and digital read-out.

My brother celebrated The Future in 1969 by tucking several copies of current magazines and newspapers into a plastic garbage bag, and squirreled them surreptitiously away in the attic. And there these magazines sat, until my parents sold the house in 1990, and I retrieved them in the very nick of time, and put them with my very small collection of personal flotsam and eclectica at my first house. When I packed these boxes up when I moved north later in the 1990′s, the boxes followed me, with their unremembered contents, until, last weekend I unpacked one in search of another oddment, and were rediscovered.

There they all were, in perfectly flat, unmolested form: Newsweek Magazines, Time Magazines, Life Magazines, copies of the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News and Chicago Tribune, all from the period of July 19th thru August 8th, 1969. There, trapped in cultural amber was the High Summer of 1969. I carefully pulled out the most accessible publication from the stack: the August 8, 1969 edition of Life.

The cover was idiomatic: The ubiquitous picture of the American Flag, standing resplendent on the surface of the Moon, astronaut footprints all around so that the view looked not so much like a lunar landscape, but rather a public beach near sunset.  The “Life” monoplate was in its usual red reverse-out in the upper left corner, and the headline, similarly reversed-out of a black field next to it exclaimed “On The Moon”. The word-play was unmistakable: “Life …On the Moon”.

But, it is the contents of the magazine that tweak our sensibilities, here in these heavy after-years. I can surround myself in the misty chords of days gone by, marveling at the mailing label on the front of the magazine that displays the long-ago address of my parents home in 1969 Mid-Michigan. But, scanning the pages inside is to take a zooming trip down the worm-hole of memory,  to see just how far we have fled from those days, and at once also to see their very genesis.

LIFE magazine was criticized in its day because it contained voluminous photographs: There was too much to look at, not enough to read, you see (an interesting complaint in the Golden Age of Playboy). But, it is startling that there are two full pages (and LIFE had BIG pages) of Letters to the Editor, in what seems to be microscopic, agate-type. One was penned by a certain denizen of Hollywood, one John Wayne, thanking the Editors for a fine review in the previous issue of his latest film “True Grit”. He started his truncated epistle with “Sirs–”.

–You would expect this of The Duke. But, all of the Letters to the Editor began thus: “Sirs–”. Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkyn were still toiling away in the salt mines of Patriarchal Repression, and hadn’t yet emerged to chasten us for such assaults on gender specificity.

All in all, this particular issue of LIFE might be the Rosetta Stone which connects the smoldering ruins of the 1960′s with the soon-to-be-scorned 1970′s: It, too, has the iconic full-page VW ad, but it also has an ad for a Toyota Corolla, extolling the virtues of its latest innovation, the automatic transmission (hard to imagine the place Toyota would have in American car culture by the time the 1970′s were through, based on this one ad. An Automatic Transmission? Really? American cars have had these since the 1930′s, and the Japanese think this is some quantum leap in technology?) There is also a music review of the Newport Jazz Festival, which was desecrated that summer by the likes of Led Zeppelin, and which was clearly the antecedent of the grizzled Woodstock, which would happen a few weeks later. There are full-page cigarette ads featuring the usual cowboys and suburban prize-fighters with black eyes (“I’d rather fight than switch!”) , but which are absent the Surgeon General’s Warnings, which, evidently, didn’t mean much to a generation that stormed the beaches at Normandy, and sent brave youngsters to the moon.

Also interesting, are several sidebar editorials (that, by the way have more words in them than most entire newspapers today) that are waxing poetic about the very-recent fall of Senator Edward Kennedy, who, only the week before had strolled non-nonchalantly in a dry leisure suit through the lobby of the Shiretown Inn on Martha’s Vineyard, looking for all the world completely unaware that a young woman by the name of Mary Jo Kopechne  was suffocating in a quickly-diminishing air-pocket his Delta 98 at the bottom of a watery inlet on Chappaquiddick Island seven miles away. Yes, these editorials swooned, the days of Camelot might indeed be done, but, isn’t it a glorious thing that the Kennedy Magic can extricate Teddy from a political catastrophe, even if it couldn’t do so for Mary Jo?

At the very end of the magazine is a four-page article which features the biographies and photos of some two-dozen young British Lasses that might make a fetching and queenly bride for Prince Charles, who is pictured looking for all the world like a member of the Monkees. None of the young ladies, by the way had the last name Spencer, or Parker-Bowles.

Yes, in this one issue of LIFE stands the great divide: On the one side lay the golden-hued memories of Camelot, on the other lay the wreckage of Teddy Kennedy’s presidential ambitions (ambitions that may or may not actually have existed). On one side is the glorious moon coverage, on the other is the truncated ends of space exploration, the concentric circles of which would become so tight and earth-bound that, by 2012, we couldn’t even retrieve our own folks from a space station we funded and built. On one side lay the fresh-faced Prince Charles, world-class bachelor, on the other, a wrinkled, strange patrician whose mother STILL seems more manly. On one side lay a free, vivacious American culture that didn’t apologize for it’s swagger, on the other lay John F. Kerry’s Winter Soldiers, spitting on the American flag.

Other than the Moon Shots, though, what was the feature of that week’s LIFE? Seen from a distance of forty years, incongruously, it is on the center spread –going on for eight luxurious full-color pages– about that newly-opened residence of supreme opulence on the Potomac called The Watergate. According the photos and the text, the complex of buildings is verily a palace for the well-heeled technocrat. Maurice Stans is pictured luxuriating with his evening cocktail, Jacob Javitz is photographed swan-diving into one of the Watergate’s five swimming pools. The entire article drips of wealth and privilege, and, in true LIFE magazine tradition, the next article is about homeless, poverty-stricken folks with mental illness. …Some roots are deep, indeed, in the pop entertainments.

You scan the articles about the Watergate, and you are struck with the time-capsule quality to it all. The glitterati frozen forever in the glossy pages have no clue about the violent maelstrom about to descend upon their moated community. Soon, it will be abbreviated from THE Watergate to simply “Watergate“. And the putrid elites, such as those at LIFE Magazine will have bagged their first quarry in Richard Nixon, and the blood-lust would never thus be stanched.

There is a soulfulness, a genuineness, to be found in old magazines, such as the issue of LIFE from August 8th, 1969. In five years, to the day, Nixon would resign. You have to search the fine print of one ad that features a test-tube wielding scientist to discover it is hawking Preparation H — in contrast to its modern-day counterparts that explosively regale us with the “itching and burning, squirming and..” Also, erectile dysfunction wasn’t a topic for polite company, let alone ten pages of glorious advertizing, which we would likely see today, if anyone still read magazines.

The truth was, in the high summer of 1969, America was Great.

Stirring paeans written to the American People were published from Tokyo, and Great Britain, gloriously praising unabashedly the virtue of American greatness. And yet, here we are, forty-three years later, fighting off the most aggressive assault to this heritage that we have seen in generations. And, this is the truth of which this magazine sings, it’s plaintive strains hardly heard above the din of a pop culture that gets a kick out of hyper-urban violent chic, of homosexual stridency, of suffocating governmental dependency, of  a bullying anti-religious zeal. The last jack-blocks are about to be knocked out from under the cultural foundation, and leafing through an old magazine shows how much we have to lose when the whole thing finally topples over.

THIS is the fight of this election. It isn’t about personalities– it’s about truth, and our final destiny as a people. It’s about being able to discern truth from a fictive narrative, and about embracing it without regard to the fallout as defined by the pop culture elites.  Are we aiming for the stars, or are we content to husband what little freedom is left, passing on ever-decreasing chunks to our children and our grandchildren? It is through this glass, and darkly, that a question self-presents:

Is there LIFE on the Moon, after 2012?

We’ve been told by the likes of Karl Rove that a strong, passionate, conservative message will scare off the “independent” voters.

Uh-huh. Whatever.

The underlying assumption with this has long infuriated me: And it is mainly that “independents” are really squishy east-coast patrician moderate polo-aficionados that get embarrassed over cocktails when the conversation turns to Sarah Palin or abortion. In the world of the professional political class, “independents” are natural political cross-dressers that look and act like country-club republicans, but, in the privacy of their homes, strip down and lounge about in the silky nostrums of liberalism– especially when it comes to “social issues”, and that we shouldn’t offend them by having a strong candidate with passionately held beliefs about American greatness, American patriotism, and limited government. It scares them.

No, we need mush to attract them. We need a squishy, dissembling “moderate” that offends no one, but inspires no one, too.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to Karl Rove’s house: Newt Gingrich won the “independent” vote over Mush Romney by 31% to 26%. And, this includes the guys with dental implants that receive messages from the CIA to go vote for Ron Paul, who only got 21% of the independents.

Of course, we were also told that Newt “Iron Zipper” Gingrich can’t win the women’s vote, either. Ooops. He won that, too, 39% to 28%. In fact, Newt appears to have won all the age demographics, including the 45-65 “Baby Boomers”, and the most Florida-centric sub-group, the 75 and older crowd, which he won by a whopping 41%.

In fact, the only sub-group Newt lost was the pro-life advocates, which was won by Rick Santorum by over 50%. But, even here, Newt garnered some 30% of the vote, with the Mittster coming in at 6%.

But, then during the coverage of the election results on FOX, we are treated to Karl “The Architect of the 2000 Florida Disaster” Rove telling us that Newt’s win was no big thing. Karl had his handy little white-board out this evening with all of his stupid chicken-scratches on it trying to point out the Newt’s margin over second place Mitt was within the realm of historical averages (-something I was able to do in one sentence WITHOUT a whiteboard. Obama needs a teleprompter; Karl Rove needs a whiteboard, I guess.)

The statistic I would like to see, though, is how far back in the polls in South Carolina during the week prior to the election, was a candidate that eventually went on to win it? This all points to a serious, salient fact: This race has never been a narrative about the inevitability of Mitt Romney, just as the fall election WILL BE about Barack Obama.

The professional political class has been wrong about every election in my lifetime: That we must appeal to independents and moderates by muting our conservatism–; Newt proved tonight they can be attracted to strength and passionate appeals to conservative reason.

As long as our candidates are willing to optimistically educate, elevate and elucidate, we win every time. Way to go, Mr. Gingrich– you’ve pocketed South Carolina doing it the right way.

From the Diary of George S. Patton, March 24th, 1945:

Drove to the river and went across on the pontoon bridge, stopping in the middle to take a piss in the Rhine, and then pick up some dirt on the far side, in emulation of William the Conqueror.

George S. Patton was rather upset by the myth that the likes of TIME and LIFE magazines had built around him: “Old Blood and Guts”, the called him, publishing all manner of pictures of him astride this tank, or that command car. One evening not too long after the Battle of the Bulge, Patton’s son-in-law, Fred Ayers, screwed up his courage enough to ask his Uncle George why he put on all the bravado, the cursing, the pistols.

“Okay, Freddy, you asked, so I’ll tell you. In any war, a commander, no matter what his rank, has to send to sure death, nearly every day, by his own orders, a certain number of men. Some are his personal friends. All are his personal responsibility, to them as his troops and to their families. Any man with a heart would, then, like to sit down and bawl like a baby, but, he can’t. So, he sticks out his jaw, and swaggers and swears, I wish some of those pious sob sister at home could understand something as basic as that.”  Then, he did smile. “And as for the kind of remarks I make, why sometimes, I just, by God, get carried away with my own eloquence.”

Of course, many of the remarks that Patton made weren’t verbal, even if they were just as eloquent. Some were physical. Many were visual, meant to inspire the men he commanded.

For example, at the very beginning of Operation Torch, and the very landings at French Morocco, Patton noticed that the landing craft were having a difficult time debauching their tanks in the heavy surf. Patton, of course, was the creator of the modern armored division, and knew better than anyone how to unload a tank in the heaving waves near the shore. So, he cast off (once the davits had been fixed after a close encounter with enemy fire) from the destroyer in which he’d set up his command post, and motored up in his little landing vessel. Once ashore, Patton set about to immediately demonstrate how to set the massive timbers, how to arrange the jacklegs and so on, and got soaked doing it. Then he returned to his ship. The tanks were unloaded.

We all are likely familiar with the shots from the George C. Scott movie of Patton driving to the front of an advancing column, getting strafed throughout, dodging bullets and weaving about in his jeep (which he always called “peeps”); or of is famous “traffic cop” scene, in which he’d untangle one convoy from another from atop an oil-drum, riding-crop in hand. These scenes, while Hollywood amalgamations of various documented events, were nonetheless true. Patton believed with all of his heart and mind in leading by example, by displays of courage and resourcefulness, of inspiring by action. He never demanded that those under his command do things he couldn’t bring himself to do.

Which is why he pissed in the Rhine River, when, in March of 1945, he finally was granted the unbridled joy of finally crossing the iconic waterway. His Third Army had raced across France in the high summer of 1944, and was within ten days of delivering Berlin into American hands– until he was stopped in favor of Montgomery’s disastrous plan of entering Germany through occupied Holland, called “Market Garden”. This ill-fated blow led, circuitously, to the Battle of the Bulge, and an thoroughly unneeded, long, tough slog that finally reached it’s zenith there, on the pontoon bridge the army had erected over the Rhine. After the death, slaughter, destruction and single-mindedness that I presume only a combat General can experience, he finally relieved himself on an enemy, quite literally, and in a manner he’d often spoken of doing.

Patton had set his mind upon a single goal: Killing Germans, killing them with dispatch, and shepherding thus his own men to safety. All else was politics, diplomacy and a total waste of time.

Hillary Clinton, despite her vainglorious accounts of landing in Bosnia under “sniper fire”, has never been in a war. Neither have I, as far as that goes. But, I have enough deep respect for those that HAVE been in a war to understand that war isn’t a garden party. It has to be mind-bendingly terrifying at moments, and the vestiges of civilization are swept away in those moments when the adrenaline starts to flow. The minutes must be frozen in the ambers of time, and the niceties of rules and regulations must seem as distant as Jupiter.

Hillary, nor her contemptible Commander-In-Chief, has never led by example in battle. She’s never wore her country’s uniform, she’s never confronted a terrifying enemy intent on murdering her. And yet, there she is: The “Sob Sister” about whom Patton so presciently spoke, getting her very large panties all a-twist, concerned again with what polite society might think of our steely warriors.

United States Marines are among our most magnificent Americans; they are absolutely the best our country has to offer. I could never do what they are asked to do, and do it so proudly, so self-sacrificially. And to hear the likes of Dame Hillary upbraid our warriors for pissing on a few corpses, and to do it with such smug outrage, is damnable. I don’t care what the background circumstances might be. I don’t care about the niceties and rules.

George Patton knew damned well that, when he urinated in the Rhine River, that the very image (a once-iconic image, by the way, which was snapped by enterprising Army photographers, and that has hung in years gone by in innumerable VFW halls throughout the land) he was sending, indeed, a message to Greater Germany: I’m pissing on you. And you deserve it, for the horrific slaughter you’ve unleashed on mankind.

In short, he was pissed off. And I’m still pissed off at the “Taliban”.

Newt’s right: It IS pious baloney, this whole Romney thing..

Not so much, though, as Newt asserted, about Mitt’s alleged Public Spiritedness (Newt, remember, poked holes in Romney’s “Citizen Businessman” meme by pointing out that Mitt has been a chronic –and mostly chronically losing– campaigner for twenty years, after these losing attempts in which he’d simply slink back into his corporate duds, and disabuse himself of electoral envy for another season). Rather, the “baloney” is that Mitt is “electable”. Out of all the candidates, Mitt is the least electable, and has a proven record of losing almost all of the campaigns he’s run, or of winning them barely– like last Tuesday’s Iowa Caucuses.

Mitt Romney, in only the narrowest definition of the term, “won” the Iowa Caucuses. In fact, there are serious allegations that the votes were miscounted, and 20 to 30 votes that went to Romney should have gone to Santorum. But, even in this stunning, awe-inspiring victory, Mitt received less votes in both percentage terms and actual votes than any Republican in modern times, going back to 1980. And, here are some interesting tid-bits:

Mitt actually received a couple dozen fewer votes (if the votes are properly counted) this time ’round than he did in 2008. He received 25 percent of the vote that year– but Mike Huckabee received 34% in his winning bid.

Mitt’s performance, had it taken place in 2000, would only been good enough for third place, behind Steve Forbes (31%) and barely in front of Alan Keyes (14%). That year, there really WAS a front-runner: George W. Bush, who received 41% of the vote, and had the Republican Party Base firmly behind him.

If the results are stacked up against those of 1988, Romney would have once again come in third place, behind both Bob Dole (26%) and Pat Robertson (25%). Likewise, in 1980, Romney’s pathetic showing would have garnered yet another third-place showing behind George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. It is far more typical for a winner in Iowa to come away with between 30 and 40 percent of the vote, rather than to limp away with a paltry 23%.

In short, there is no Romney Juggernaut. If he’s the frontrunner, it’s only by virtue of his hair sticking out more than his nearest competitor.

Historical context is always important  when making the sort of charges that Newt Gingrich made in Sunday’s New Hampshire debate. As fate would have it, though, Newt Gingrich is an historian. And, that was his point: Romney continues to paint himself as some sort of virtuous Citizen Candidate, only emerging from the paneled boardrooms in this, the Nation’s Moment of Crisis– when, in fact, Mitt Romney has been a carrier of the Electoral Pathogen for over twenty years, and it has metastasized into a full-blown case of Potomac Fever.

As we all know, he ran and won for the GOP Senatorial Nomination in 1994 by besting a severely damaged opponent, and then losing to Teddy Kennedy. Now, do we remember 1994? Of course we do: That was the year that the Democrat Party was decimated, and the year Harris Wofford, the ancient Pennsylvania Democrat dinosaur went down in flames to Rick Santorum. But, Teddy Kennedy beat Mitt Romney by a whopping 17%. Likewise, of course, we know what a horrible year for Republicans 2006 was: Mitt knew it too, so he “retired” from politics, paving the way for Democrat Deval Patrick to pick up Romney’s vacated seat, winning the contest over Kerry Haley by some billion percentage points.

Electorally speaking: Mitt Romney is NOT electable, and Newt Gingrich finally brought it up. And, the former governor needs to be hammered on this time and time and time again: He can’t close the deal with the electorate. Some say that the Achilles’ Heal of the Romney Campaign is “Romneycare”. It ought to be, but it isn’t. The real, unspoken downfall of the Mittster’s campaign is that, in stark contrast to the media narrative, Governor Romney is… well,.. a loser. Time after time, and in historical settings.

Oh, sure, the “polls” say he’s the one that can beat Obama. But, that’s in a theoretical campaign that hasn’t started yet. You know, the sort of a campaign that doesn’t feature actual issues, or actual opposition research, or vicious democrat party tactics, or a thoroughly corrupted left-wing news media.  As soon as it becomes a real campaign, though, with Barack Obama as his opponent with his billion-dollar machine, Mitt Romeny will conform to type: A Massachusetts Moderate who comes off as inauthentic social-climbing technocrat.

…and, in a word: “unelectable”.

For God’s Sake, South Carolina, wake up from your nap before you end up giving us all a Romney Nightmare.