MOVING RIGHT ALONG....

Now the Congressional seat of the fiery and phony Anthony Weiner, which had been in Democratic hands since 1923, has been claimed by a 70-year-old GOP buffoon who originally opposed having the Federal government help those sickened in the 9/11 attacks and who told a Jewish district that this is a Christian country -- which means, if it means anything, that Jews are second-class citizens. Jews voted for him anyway, dramatizing their discontent with the administration and in the knowledge that this turkey won't be in office long enough to cause them much tsuris.

Dem angst will reach new highs. But the pols won't do anything, as they're constitutionally incapable of it.

In recent days I exchanged emails several times with Rabbi Michael Lerner, humanitarian and social activist, who months ago proposed the formation of a Dump Obama movement patterned on the Dump LBJ movement of 1968. Rabbi Lerner has a strategy that I take it he doesn't want discussed publicly yet, so I'll say only that I don't believe anything will avail us but the arrival of a hard-hitting Dem candidate who's in it for nothing less than to take the nomination and the election. Nor do I think that any organization can generate such a candidate. It has to be someone self-motivated and undeferential toward what others have in mind.

Optimally, I believe, such a candidate would come from the military, for a combination of forcefulness, patriotism, authority, and bravery. Someone with military credentials could safely propose pulling out of the Dubya wars. The risk would be that he or she would manifest the wrong kind of outspokenness, as political amateurs are prone to do; so the candidate would have
to be very bright, with a shrewd sense of just how far to go.

Best of all I'd wish for some crusty old general, perhaps from a pro-union working class family, who doesn't suffer fools at all but is engaging and pointedly funny and a natural leader able to stir conviction and build confidence.

The campaign should stress necessity rather than idealism and should both sound alarms and offer inspiration and a call to tackle our situation with high spirits. As for the Republicans, it should show them no quarter whatever. The candidate should call them anti-American sons of bitches and should demand their complete and permanent marginalization and their replacement as the opposition party by something patriotic and socially tolerable; this is war, not just politics.

Picture our general telling a rally that the Republicans want to wreck the country so their clients can sell it for scrap. While another kind of Dem wouldn't dare do that, I think someone who was recognized as a realist and a fighter could get away with such hyperbole and make it work. To be willing to raise eyebrows can be to win admiration for having guts. Imagine a minor version of Dwight Eisenhower or Doug MacArthur who channels Harry Truman.

In the media, that bulwark of the status quo, we have a paper tiger, disliked and mistrusted. The candidate should answer only what he or she wishes to answer and field the rest with good-humored quips and cool firmness. I would have him or her propose that corporations be required to divest themselves of media holdings and that the news business be owned by a guild of reporters and journalists with a charter that forbids editorializing and one-sided coverage.

You never hear a politician mention the population explosion, and they say little about climate change, though these are headed for us and are enormously dangerous. This candidate could incorporate those issues, not by emphasizing them but by indicating that when there is leadership it will be possible to discuss and evaluate them democratically and plan ahead for the sake of our long-term security. People know that we're adrift and want reassurance.

Will we see a new Andrew Jackson come forward? I suppose not. But I continue to believe that we will see an alternative to what we have now. How much of one? Fingers crossed!