Hall Of Famer Agonistes

Any normal person with a bank account or a piggy bank would have shared my reaction.

Here was a contemporary of mine, a fellow I had admired since he was 23 and I was 30, and whom I still admire, being trashed by the left wing media as an obstructionist in the U.S. Senate.

All Jim Bumming was doing was what William F. Buckley Jr. used to exhort ALL of us to do: "Stand athwart History’s intended path and say "STOP".

Bunning, who starred in both major leagues as a right handed pitcher for the Tigers, Phillies and Dodgers, was blocking the body's consideration of a $50 billion spending bill.

Even though it was a dribble in the ocean of deficit debt this congress and administration is piling on our descendants, and even though it extended a portion of unemployment benefits, Bunning was more like Jimmy Stewart in Mister Smith Goes to Washington that he was like, say a Malaprop-clueless Barbara Boxer.

Yet many of his Republican senatorial colleagues and ALL the liberal mainstream media characterized him as a comic figure.

Shuddering at the approaching chimera of a half-Trillion dollar Obamacare frosting on the fallen cake of ne’er-do-well governance , it is difficult for this observer to criticize the strike-thrower from Kentucy.

Bunning is retiring. He will soon be 80. But even though he is the one senator to take the opportunity to say "WAKE UP ! ENOUGH IS TOO MUCH", and even though 30 Republicans approved the $50 billion "pittance" in deficit spending, I still find it bizarre that one editorial writer in southern California and this post are the only applause I have found for Senator Bunning.

The Hall of Famer fared better on the mound. I remember him winning 19 games three years in a row for the Phillies.

But he made some deficit deniers nervous. I wish him well; I wish, too, that he had managed a filibuster collapse (just mildly) like Jimmy Stewart.

Would that have shaken the doctrinaire left liberal media out of their profligate trance?

Maybe not...but as Carl Sandburg famously said: "The People, YES !!!"

Will His Addiction Affect History ?

This is not the first time that it has been posted here that The UK Telegraph is the best newspaper in the English language.

Late Sunday, the crack journalists there reported that U.S. Navy physicians who gave President Obama his first physical exam since his inauguration asked him to stop smoking and put the brakes on alcohol consumption.

You will NOT rtead this on your front page...OR see it on the alphabet TV news rants.


So here's a Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/01/barack-obama-told-to-quit-smoking.

May not be important,of course. Time, Newsweek and People will not carry it or will bury it. TMZ might get a word in.

We've had a lot of advice from the top two in the White House about our "intake". That pair should practice what they preach.

But, then, they have a heavy burden. They're in an unfamiliar environment where folks expect some modicum of similarity with what one says and what one does.

Charley Rangel, William Jefferson and all the bankers are watching.