Bankrupt of arguments to defend their many disastrous stands on public policy, Barack Obama and his Democratic allies have resorted to a last desperate stand…calling their Republican adversaries mean, unfeeling, slavish to the rich.
That’s what Obama is doing with John Boehner…calling him unfeeling, uncompassionate, charging that he is holding middle class tax cuts hostage in order to get tax cuts for the rich. By singling out Boehner, this highly unpopular president is doing the GOP House leader an inestimable benefit (by assailing private citizen Richard Nixon as “a chronic campaigner,” Lyndon Johnson boosted one who was called a sure loser to stature helping Nixon win the `68 nomination). Usually personal attacks like this are done by vice presidents who are the hatchet-men for their administrations. But Obama doesn’t care.

In this campaign season, other Democrats under siege call some of their Republican adversaries much worse; they say they’re loopy. And in primaries where Tea Party candidates are a threat, establishmentarian Republicans do the same thing…as they did with Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Joe Miller of Alaska.

Loopy: It’s a name not just Democrats play. Establishmentarian Republican Mike Castle, the congressman-at-large in Delaware, is calling his Tea Party-supported adversary Christine O’Donnell nutty, loopy.

Let’s get this straight. At this desperate pass in our country’s history, I favor most Republicans over Democrats bar-almost none, believing that even when proven loopy, I’d take a loopy conservative Republican U.S. senator over a liberal Democrat whose disastrous liberal philosophy on the economy and national security is a threat to this nation. That’s not to say Angle and O’Donnell are loopy…but even if they have eccentricities, in the present pass this country’s in, I gladly accept them.

I well remember a few members of Congress who definitively were loopy. And they held important posts: Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations and Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

The Chairman’s Asleep.

Sen. Theodore Francis Green), Democrat of Rhode Island, was chairman of Senate Foreign Relations when I worked as a staffer in the House in 1957. Teddy (as everybody called him behind his back) was born in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War. In his 90th year he presided over some very important deliberations concerning the Cold War including the creation of the Marshall Plan, Truman’s Point 4 proposal and NATO. One day the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was testifying before Green’s committee when everybody noticed something.

The chairman was sound asleep. Everybody coughed and stirred but he didn’t awake. A staffer then came to him and nudged him awake. Dulles continued but Green, cupping his hand over his ear, complained he couldn’t hear. They checked Dulles’ microphone which was working. Finally the same staffer came up to him on the platform and adjusted his then cumbersome hearing aid, the 1950s variety with wires and batteries. It had run out of juice.

Old as he was and stone deaf as he was, Teddy Green was still sharp at 92 when he was persuaded to pack it in and not seek reelection in 1958.

Loopy? Not in the slightest. Nobody, not his Republican adversaries in Congress or Rhode Island, suggested that Teddy was loopy.

I remember a case that was even worse. I was a Quaker Oats lobbyist in the mid-`70s and was working on a bill involving cereal television commercials to kids. The legislation was crafted in the Senate Commerce committee and had to be ratified by the House Ways and Means committee.

“Hello, Orville?”

Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) was chairman of the Senate Commerce committee. Slowly but surely he was falling victim to dementia. He was not all that old but it was getting apparent. What was also mystifying was that he had the strangest association with names…including people he had known for a long time.

Magnuson’s secretary was deputized to remind him constantly to make one important phone call…to Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), chairman of Ways and Means concerning legislation my company and the entire cereal industry was interested in. She would come to him and say “Senator, can I call Chairman Mills for you now?”

He’d say what? Who? She’d say “Chairman Mills.” Who? “Wilbur Mills.” Oh yes. Call him now. She placed the call from his desk, saying “Sen. Magnuson is calling for Chairman Mills.” She waited and handed the receiver to Magnuson, saying “Senator, Chairman Wilbur Mills is on the line. Wilbur Mills!”

Magnuson took the receiver to his ear and said, “Orville?”

Afterward I asked her: “You were very clear to him that it was Wilbur Mills. Why did he call him Orville?

Simple, she said. The mind in dementia makes funny associations. The name Wilbur somehow made him think of Orville. You know? Wilbur and Orville Wright!

Now Magnuson was loopy but for many years he was one of the savviest lawmakers in the Senate. Washington state voters had no trouble reelecting him over and over until his doctors said “time’s up.”

Again: At this stage in our country’s history, I’d take a loopy conservative over any liberal Republican or any liberal Democrat. Media, Democrats, liberal Republicans plus at least one major conservative source are condemning Tea Party’er Christine O’Donnell who is challenging incumbent GOP Congressman Mike Castle for the party’s senatorial nomination…saying she’s loopy.

The Most Important Issue in Delaware.

O’Donnell has had a tough time paying her bills…rent, mortgage for which Mike Castle has criticized her—but if all the people in Delaware squeezed by the recession votes for her, she’s win by a tsunami.
Then they decided to really certify she is loopy.
Before she ran for the Senate, she conducted various seminars for her Catholic Church. And as an authenticist Catholic had been quoted…get this:

Masturbation is a sin.

Of course to modern secular ears that’s a laugh. Not to most Catholics. And as an authenticist Catholic, O’Donnell is right. She never entered the subject in her campaign but was quoted as saying this in church seminars when she was lecturing on abstinence and chastity,.

Mike Castle’s campaign had researched it and picked up her comment, rumoring it around…the indication being she’s loopy.

What they expected her to do is to disavow it. Why so when her Church teaches it is a sin when generative powers are prevented from achieving their divinely intended purpose? She has also stated long ago that masturbation equals adultery…and they made that another issue arguing she is loopy.

Her Catholic theology says this: Adultery is sexual congress between a married person and one to whom he/she is not married although both are mortal sins. My guess is that there’s a spiritual calculator operating in heaven someplace that registers calibrations on mortal sin…and (this is me talking not the Church) masturbation does not rank as significant as adultery. But the intention of Castle’s campaign is to use these moral issues to make it appear thatChristine O’Donnell is loopy.

Now let’s consider Mike Castle, the GOPer who is saying Christine O’Donnell is loopy.

This is his record:

In the U.S. House, 10-term incumbent Castle was one of 10 liberal GOP members to support Bill Clinton on most key issues working to water-down conservative positions on guns, tax cuts and education spending. In 2007 when the Dems took over the House, Castle was one of only three Republicans to vote with the Dems on major liberal issues in Nancy Pelosi’s widely heralded “First 100 Hours” of the Democratic Congress…including
….hiking the minimum wage (which has dire affects on employment)…granting federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells (heedless of the life issue involved and despite the availability and better utility of adult stem cells merely because Planned Parenthood told them to)…pressuring drug companies to lower the cost of pharmaceuticals which worsened the Medicare deficit…cutting interest rates on federalized student loans in half (adding to the deficit)…spending big bucks to “foster energy independence” (windmills).

Since then he voted to bail out financial markets which has prompted national outrage given the markets are back to normal and America continues jobless. And you’re telling me that Castle’s primary opponent Christine O’Donnell is loopy because of her authentic Catholic views? Give me a break.

Talk About Loopy: Meet Joe Biden!

Talk about loopy representing Delaware in the Senate…… Delaware has just had a longtime liberal Democratic senator, a two-time presidential candidate—now our vice president—who serves in the second highest office in the land despite two near-death brain aneurisms and who since his operation told Katie Couric (who nodded approvingly by the way showing how astute in history she is) that FDR soothed the nation talking on television after the Crash of `29…

… One who even before the aneurisms appropriated in whole bio of Neil Kinnock of Wales, a British Laborite leader of parliament for himself without amendment…who said that he (Joe Biden) was the first of his family to go to college (as was Kinnock) but not Biden. Who got into a heated dispute on the stump about his high IQ. The list of Biden’s errors are too long to list. He’s become a national joke including his fatuous proposal to divide Iraq into four equal parts like Gaul.
All this and we should worry about Christine O’Donnell? What has she remotely done…or conceivably can do…that can rival Biden? We should worry about her because like many Americans she’s had a tough time paying her bills? Or that she has an authenticist opinion on masturbation? Or porno?

More tomorrow. About Harry Reid who says that his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, is also loopy.

Until then, give me your opinion. If you lived in Delaware would you vote for Christine O’Donnell or would you call her loopy? Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics invited.

**

Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer