Margaret Carlson Bloomberg New

March 19, 2012
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg New
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005

RE: The GOP chick problem; Here comes the TAX man; Count those votes, maybe twice; Has the Hound picked up your scent?; Finger nails on the blackboard grammar flub – Some comments on your column in Sunday’s Miami Herald

Dear Peg,

First, the stupendously egregious error.

“Then again, none of its basic facts have been challenged…”

In your eagerness to advance your cause you forgot that none is a collective noun. 3rd person singular, present tense the verb always ends with s as in has. Got it?
It’s a small thing, no bigger than a man’s fist on the horizon, but it can be an acid test.

I am glad to see that you landed on your feet after Bloomberg dumped its Opinion section. I thought you went to your favorite seat by the fire in your son Tucker’s home. He is a yhoung man any mother could be proud of.

If you work for about 17 more years you should be able to replace the losses you sustained in your 401K account. Solyndra had many victims. If they could flim-flam the Nobel Prize winning President and his Nobel Prize winning Energy Secretary what chance did you have? Maybe you could get the DC franchise rights for the soon to be successful $50 light bulb. Move over Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald! Here comes Maggie! You could yet make the 1%. As soon as the 99%ers find out they will come and take a group dump on your lawn.

But I digress.

It’s been 11 and ½ years since you said that all overseas deployed GIs were tax cheats. Further, you said that because they were all going to vote for Bush their votes shouldn’t be counted. Maybe Cook County or Hudson County could use them as they have in the past.

It just dawned on me that all the troops you called tax cheats were deployed on Big Bill Clinton’s watch.

Since we are within the octave of Saint Patrick’s Day allow me some leeway as I do a wee bit of stream of consciousness a la James Joyce.

I am reading your column about the HBO movie about Sarah Palin. As soon as the coven of ink stained modern American Liberal winches – [wretches would be accepted as a substitute] found out that she does not worship at the altar of abortion, abortion, abortion, including the rarely performed 5th trimester one, she becomes less than worthless. She became the anti-Gravitas candidate.

[As an aside, I am curious as to how all the public Roman Catholic women square the circle of abortion. Essentially they – you – want to able both to eat your cake and have it. I suggest the successful Martin Luther model. He could not reconcile his beliefs with the Roman Catholic Church. You remember that one, don’t you? Christ said to Peter that “Upon this rock I will build me Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”, that one. Luther had an honesty not found in modern American Liberal women. He started his own church.]

Once Sarah Palin failed that test the cannons of modern American Liberalism were trained on her. It’s a small thing but I bet that she knows that there are 50 states in the Union. Her handy mnemonic device is to look at the American flag. If the number of Stars doesn’t change the number of states is still 50. She knows that if Austrians speak Austrian, that Belgians probably speak Belgian, that the inhabitants of Elba speak Elbanian, that people living in Albany speak Albanian, and that Indians [red dot, not native moose hunters] speak Indian. The damn thing is that she broke the mold of inevitability set by Lord Barack the Beneficent when she discovered that Alaskans don’t speak Alaskan.

John Sparkman [D-AL] was Adlai Stevenson’s first VP candidate. Whatever else he was he was a stone cold racist. He liked “Birth of a Nation” more than “Gone with the Wind”. He always called “them” Nigras. He gave the name of his custom KKK robe tailor to Robert Byrd [D-WVA] Since he could pee standing up I won’t mention him.

Let’s take Geraldine Felini Zuchini.

Other than her lack of a prostate gland and her toes on the line mobbed up husband what particular qualifications did she bring to the table in 1984? If she played Gracie Allen to Mondale’s George Burns it would have been cruel and unusual punishment.

If Mondale – and wasn’t he just a boob? – had been elected he would have put her in charge of “shovel ready” jobs. What with her “family” connection to the building trades it would have been a natural. She would have balanced the budget by putting the squeeze on cement dealers, garbage companies, and the restaurant linen business. It’s true that she wouldn’t know how to dress or cook a moose but her uncle “Big Moose” and his son. “Little Moose” would have been able to help her. Their small loan collection business was so successful that they would have been glad to help her. Speaking of family values, her son was known as “The Druggist”. It was not because he worked at Walgreen’s.

Then we come to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Like the current First Lady she wrote an interesting senior thesis. Ms. Obama, soon to be known as the Queen of Spandex and the champion of visible panty lines, wrote hers on how hard it was to be a Black woman on a full scholarship to Princeton University. Don’t think me a cad but if she had been a scholarship student at Ms. Fatima’s School for Cliteroidectomied Girls in Kafiristan I would have had a different perspective on it. I might, for the first time, even be proud of her and her country

Hillary Rodham’s senior thesis was on the heroic exploits of the quintessential community activist, Saul Alinsky. Honest. You could look it up.

Her professional career showed that no glass ceiling was going to stop her.

It was just a coincidence that she was hired by the state’s largest law firm after her husband was elected Attorney General.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist but I think it was still just a coincidence that she was made a partner in the state’s largest law firm after husband, Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, was elected Governor

“I am woman, hear me roar” worked for her, didn’t it?

Because of her vast experience and because she sometimes slept with the Governor [“Once a year” was what she supposedly told her “pal” Vince Foster] she was made an outside director of TCBY – The Country’s Best Yogurt. The food police would have put her in the nearest Cuisinart today.

When WALMART came calling she said “I’m your girl”. Her connection with WALMART is glossed over and any pictures of her as Greeter for a Day have been airbrushed out as if she were a Politburo member who came fell on hard times.

At some point she knew that her husband would, and probably did, hump a snake if someone held its head.

The highlight of her time in the White House was when she and Big Bill, King of the One-Eyed Trouser Snakes, came back from church one Easter Sunday. She went upstairs to whet her “Woman as Victim” psyche. The President of the United States went into the Oval Office to get a big girl, knock out her eye teeth hummer from the zoftig intern. And this qualifies her to be what?

What a country! “That’s why”, as Big Mike from Bayonne, the legendary sportsman, noted restaurateur, and now a distinguished public servant, still says, “You never see anybody swimming to Cuba”.

But I digress.

You said on Thanksgiving, 2000 that all American GIs deployed overseas were tax cheats. Further, and the only way to make tax cheating worse was, or so you told us, that the grunts or gruntresses were all going to vote for George Bush. Since you weren’t sure what percentage would have done so your solution was simple: Toss them all out.

We have a bit of a poser in 2012.

Barack Hannibal Obama deployed 35,000 troops to Afghanistan. In the normal troop rotation anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 new GIs were sent to Afghanistan and/or Iraq. Let’s split the difference. There could be as many as 110,000 “extra” votes. Imagine what that could have done in Palm Beach County in 2000. Remember what it did do in West Virginia and Illinois in 1960.

It makes no sense to send them to Blue states. We know that no Red state will ever see them.

How about we channel the ghost of King Daley the First of Chicago into being the gatekeeper? He would hold them in reserve – the votes, not the soldiers - until midnight. He would know which of the Purple states could use a thumb on the scale. Or two. Or a 12 volt battery. Or 2 snow tires and a few bar bells. Or a box of hammers. Or whatever it takes.

That’s it for a while.

Let me remind you that there is still ample time for you to make your Easter Duty. How quaint and discordant that sounds.

And there is that great opening line that you can never quite get out of your head.

“Halfway through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error.”




Kevin Smith