Category Archives: Comment

The GOP obsession with Bill Clinton’s sex life

Above: Bill Clinton, the Teflon horn dog by Christopher Cobblewright 

Republicans are still blowing their load over Bill’s blowjob

by Dell Franklin

They’re at it again, this time comparing him to comedian and one-time black role-model Bill Cosby, accused as a sexual predator who doped up young women and underage girls, stripped and molested them in their blacked-out state, as alleged by about fifty of his victims. They’re on the warpath again, still pissed off that the other Bill, Bill Clinton, had the audacity to allow a horny little star-struck intern infatuated with power to give him a blowjob.

“Shame on you, Bill, you awful sexual degenerate.”

Even more hideous, Bill took this poor unsuspecting innocent to the LINCOLN ROOM! Of all the nerve! But where else could a man with as high a profile as President William Jefferson Clinton take a plump horn-dog in heat for a little organ hounding—Motel 6? Certainly not the Marriott or Hilton or the Four Seasons. He was already in enough trouble for taking up with hussies like Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, a tough one to resist, that one.

I admire a man with a healthy sex drive, as long as he’s not trying to steal my woman or committing rape. Unlike some of our past Presidents, like Nixon, Reagan, Carter and probably would-be President Romney, I don’t think Bill slept in his pajamas, unless Hillary was beside him. Bill’s a cad. As a bartender, I’ve observed men like Clinton, with the gleam in their eyes and the smooth gift of gab that reels in the ladies, irresistible sexual magnets we as fellow men all admire and at the same time envy—by men like Nixon who probably got laid by one woman his entire life (and had to beg for that) and then had to witness JFK poking everything that walked, the lecherous rascal, turning the White House into his own private brothel.

Typical goddamn liberal Democrat, ey?

So those sexually repressed puritanical Republicans, who as a collective agency profess to worship the Lord and marry one woman for life and never stray, are dredging up Bill’s blowjob again and acquainting it with sexual predator status, the flavor of today. The party of deeply religious closet gays in Congress pawing up pages and molesting teenage members of a wrestling team and hanging out in bathroom stalls at airports (all tight-assed against gay marriage, mind you) and senators paying for prostitutes is at it again, led by the thrice-married Donald Trump, trying to drag poor old Hillary Clinton down for being married to perhaps the most sexually active man to ever live in the White House and seldom screw his own wife.

Typical goddamn liberal Democrat, ey?

Christ, Hillary didn’t marry Bill for his dick, she’s too sophisticated and savvy a woman—she married him for his brains, charm, humanity and ambition, not to mention he’s just about the most charismatic rake to ever come down the pike.

Trump’s no one to talk, tossing off one wife after another for younger flesh. The Donald, who has stated he likes sex with ladies rather than drink booze, is suddenly a sanitized sentinel of high moral ground as he joins fellow members of the saints’ party to demonize the First Lady who put up with his ongoing adultery, even accusing her of enabling his dastardliness.

Christ, she didn’t marry him for his dick, she’s too sophisticated and savvy a woman—she married him for his brains, charm, humanity and ambition, not to mention he’s just about the most charismatic rake to ever come down the pike.

The trouble with most of these Republicans holding office, the same ones who tried to impeach Bill for lying about his adultery when everybody knows you lie until caught when it comes to cheating, is that, from grammar school onward, they were too busy being ambitious as well as perfect while Bill was getting laid in many different forms, realizing early on nothing compares with indecent sport-fucking of the forbidden fruit, and especially painted floozies like Paula Jones. (Just ask rogue writers Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski).

Poor paranoid prude Richard Nixon, who accompanied his wife on a first date as a hanger-on while another man squired Pat, and Carter, who admitted looking at young shapely pussy, swallowed hard, denied his prick, and kissed Rosalynn on the cheek and showed us his cheesy saved smile while Jesus forgave him for having naughty fantasies. Reagan, of course, must have gotten plenty in those Hollywood days when he wasn’t fingering so-called communists and turning them in, and could hardly pose as pious when he married an ex-actress who tried unsuccessfully to fuck every movie mogul in town to become a star, and failed, but ended up as a White House First Lady urging young people to be strong and celibate in fear of disease while she steered Ronnie around like a somnambulist.

Currently Rand Paul’s wife, Kelley, a kind of vivacious winsome blonde, is on cable TV attacking Bill, claiming it will be hard for Hillary to be a candidate espousing women’s rights when her husband’s a sexual predator. Well, when one is married to a pantywaist like Rand one could hardly distinguish between a predator and a playboy, the latter of which she’s badly in need of. Like all the blonde reptiles after his hide, from Ann Coulter to Megyn Kelly, Bill’s going to stick in their craws until the bitter end, especially when Hillary gets elected President, gag gag.

Thing is, what will they say when their worst nightmare occurs and Hillary’s in the White House and Bill’s First Man? God forbid she goes on a foreign policy trip to meet with Merkel and Putin if they’re still around and Bill’s on his own in the Lincoln Room, the old coot well into his seventies but still highly suspect of sleazing after 20-year-old interns, if, of course, Hillary allows young succulent babes on the premises. My guess is her advisers will insist she hire all young male Ivy League twerps to keep an eye on him.

I can still see the outrage after rumor of Bill’s first suspicious act of indecency—“He’s at it again! He’s committing fellatio with interns, the rotten no-good sexual predator, he’s soiling the sheets in the Lincoln Room! The sneaky depraved cheat just can’t get enough, and he’s an old man!”

In gyms and marketplaces and bowling alleys and post offices and hair salons and coffee houses and diners and meeting places, media centers all over America will issue an eerie bereaved chant—“He’s at it again, he’s at it again, we can’t get rid of him, we can’t get rid of him…he’s getting blowjobs, he’s getting blowjobs….”

Eat your hearts out, pencil-necks! §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog Wilbur, a disturbed chocolate lab who will bite your head off if you say another word about Bill Clinton’s blowjob. Dell maintains an online presence at dellfranklin.com.

ROGUE VOICE INTERVIEW

Ibrahim Ahmed speaks out on Trump’s disdain for Muslims

COMMENT.ROVOICE INTERVIEWEditor’s note:

Soon after Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested we bar all non-citizen Muslims from entering the U.S. and participating in American culture and life, Ibrahim Ahmed, a poet and contributing author to The Rogue Voice, who has been with us from the beginning, even during the worst of the Bush years, went into hiding.

Never before has Ibrahim, a naturalized citizen of the U.S., felt compelled to remove his face from the public square, not even during the spike in attacks on Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11.

Some of his enemies claim that he’s put on a hijab and is posing as a woman, working the streets of Las Vegas as a high-rent hooker and robbing people once he gets them into their motel rooms; others say he’s become one of the world’s first Muslim transvestites to come out of the closet and is on his way to do a TV special with Caitlin Jenner before he has “The Procedure,” both of which he would find offensive if he was as much of a hater as Donald Trump is. But Ibrahim is not a hater, and we caught up with him in Fresno, where the farmers there think he’s a Mexican, and where he’s living in a mouse-infested trailer and for the last week has been working in the fields as a farmhand. The trailer is set back deep behind a stand of old oaks beside a dried up creek bed and was probably once used as a meth lab but the crusty hovel keeps Ibrahim safe from, and out of view of, Muslim haters—at least for now.

THE ROGUE VOICE: Ibrahim, it took us awhile to track you down, why did you go into hiding? Why the sudden disappearance? We’ve been worried about you. And…how did you find this shithole?

IBRAHIM AHMED: First, let’s just say up front that I’m not a jihadist, I’m a Muslim. My religion is a peaceful one. Second, I’m not hiding. I live in a different shithole in Grover Beach. I came to Fresno to meet some friends, go have a few drinks, and maybe go dancing, and the next thing I know, I wake up and here I am, sleeping and working with a bunch of Mexicans who are really nice, not rapists. Can you help me get the fuck outta here?

RV: Seems pretty obvious to me, ‘Rahim, that you’re not a “jihadist.” Why would anyone think that?

IA: Americans are a deeply divided and fearful people. They always have been, from the very beginning. Slavery and elitism made certain of that. Even the Founders warned of how divisive this nation might become because of inequalities between slave and free. Remember the Civil War? Then, there’s ignorance, of which there seems to be plenty in America. Americans, especially Republicans, tend to be less educated than the rest of the world and have not benefited from their isolation from other nations, or from their lack of military service. Most Americans speak English only and eat their meals watching Fox News or MSNBC, and many would be considered slow or “special” in other parts of the world, and I don’t mean in the “exceptional” sense of the word where Americans think they are better than everyone else. In most cases, they are not. Does that make me a jihadist? Can we go now?

RV: ‘Rahim, federal agents from ICE visited your home recently and brought your wife in for questioning after you disappeared. I guess they’ve been monitoring your calls and reading your poetry and building a case against you, claiming you are not really who you say you are. Are you not guilty of spewing anti-American propaganda and stirring up unrest in Grover Beach, questioning the values of our political system, and calling it a rigged game for the wealthy?

IA: Well, I did not say any of those things, and my wife…she doesn’t know where I am, does she? Oh, Allah, she’s going to kick my ass when I get home. Maybe we could stop for some drinks on the way outta here. Whaddya say?

RV: Um, well, I guess your wife was pretty pissed off about you going on a drinking binge in Fresno with your friends without talking to her first about it and she told the agents that you’d flown to Syria to join ISIS, and that you could go fuck yourself for going the way of the devil. Go ahead and blow yourself up, for all she cares! The feds put out a bulletin to all local law enforcement with your mug on it. They’re looking for you, ‘Rahim. You could be in danger. It might not be safe to go home.

IA: Christ! I mean, all praise and glory to you, Allah! This is all Donald Trump’s fault. If he hadn’t declared an American jihad against Muslims, I wouldn’t be in this mess right now. I could go home and straighten things out with the wife, maybe lift up her burka and…oh, forget it! Goddamn it! This country has turned into the land of pussies not the free! Even Obama is considered a pussy now, according to Fox News. A buncha scaredy cats who wouldn’t know the difference between a Muslim, a socialist, or a jihadist, even if they met one. If you live in a free country but you’re always scared of refugees and children, you’re not really free, are you?

What’s wrong with this country, I ask you? I’ll tell you. People stopped being decent to one another. There’s no decency, not in the media, not in the social networks, not on talk radio, not in the government…have you ever tried driving LA freeways? No one talks to anyone any more. No one listens. Everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs, honking their horns. The rich started crying and whimpering and complaining, and the working class started crying and whimpering and complaining. Where does it end? Who’s going to fix it? I’ll tell you as soon as we leave this Allah-forsaken place. Can we go now?

RV: One last thing, ‘Rahim. It’s getting dark soon and we can leave under cover of darkness. OK? Until then, what advice would you give Americans who think we should keep Muslims out of the country?

IA: I would say, yes, be afraid, America, be very afraid, but do not fear the Muslims; fear instead the Donald Trumps, the haters, and the small-minded, who would convince you that we all are jihadists and work for ISIS. Americans must understand after all that ISIS has killed more Muslims than Americans and Europeans. But the Donald Trumps do not tell you that. They say we are all dangerous, that we pose a threat, that we must shut down our mosques, but then a crazy white guy goes into a health clinic or a school and blows a bunch of people away. Who can you trust? Be afraid.

RV: You can trust me, ‘Rahim. Let’s get outta here! And leave your gun here, don’t take it with you. Give it to your Mexican friends. Come on, let’s scram! §

Stacey Warde is a farmhand and publisher of The Rogue Voice. This interview was not recorded and no notes were taken.

The witch doctor—unmasked

COMMENT.WITCHDOCTOR

The real and very famous Dr. Ben Carson is indeed a witch doctor in the political stratosphere, full of ridiculous economic and foreign policy nostrums and voodoo.

by Dell Franklin

For a while it seemed the witch doctor possessed a suit of armor even the clever and pugnacious Donald Trump could not dent, much less pierce—he was a famously successful black man with a great American come-up-from-the-bootstraps story as well as blessed by the Lord and in the mold of ultra-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the exact kind of black man George H.W. Bush and the GOP brain trust loved to shove up the asses of politically correct white liberal Democrats.

The witch doctor did not use street lingo even if he was from the mean streets of Detroit and never uttered “y’all, or “you all.” The witch doctor carefully refrained from insulting his whiter-than-white competition and realized if he raised his voice or engaged in salty invective he would lapse into the stereotype of the white man’s version of the angry “uppity nigger.” The witch doctor was not an amen-shouting, gospel-singing, rocking-in-the-aisles Jesus-chanting Baptist but instead a deeply religious strangely serene Seventh Day Adventist who didn’t believe in evolution or climate change and claimed when he was at his lowest as a street psychopath he met God and found his path to being a world-famous neurosurgeon. The witch doctor was sweetly mellow and exuded a calm patience and tolerance toward his inquisitors when they tried to pigeon-hole him on his views, which he wriggled out of with some unusual circular double-talk that made absolutely no sense but was so coated in sugar that even his absurd flat tax or tithing and comparison of Obamacare to slavery was given a free ride.

The Donald searched for an opening to wound the great witch doctor as he gained ground on him and passed him in the polls after the Donald smugly conceded he was a “nice guy” when he was ahead. None of the candidates knew how to puncture the now front-running witch doctor as he continued his slew of sweetness to the evangelicals who would vote for a person capable of destroying the planet with either war or the denial of climate change as long as he promised to eliminate Planned Parenthood and believed in the rapture.

But the Donald played his cards just right, waiting for the dreaded, hated and despicable media to nail the witch doctor, and when they did, on exaggerations and myth-making of his personal history, the Donald, who also despises the dreaded, hated and despicable media and makes no secret of it, pounced, making a mockery of the witch doctor alluding to his own words of characterizing himself—the witch doctor—as a “psychopath” as a young kid in the ghetto. Ahh, the Donald instantly went after the witch doctor like a shark in a feeding frenzy.

As soon as the media began finding lies in his great story of “Gifted Hands,” the witch doctor began whining and blaming and turned into a petulant aggrieved wounded black man who now had to absorb far more media abuse than the dreaded, hated and despicable Obama ever had to absorb, boohoo. In fact, the witch doctor had to, in his own words, absorb more scrutiny and “vicious lies” than anybody in the history of the country, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, or anybody else who ever ran for high office in America!

The witch doctor is being persecuted because he is so perfect and genuine that the dreaded, hated, despicable media, along with the cruel incompetent Democrats, cannot stand it. They are “desperate” to take him down because they are terrified he will defeat them. During a press conference where his honesty was questioned, the witch doctor’s calm and pleasant and always sweet demeanor became animated and his eyes turned stony as he lashed out at his inquisitors, waving his arms around, adhering to the last bastion for politicians caught in double-talk or outright deception—blame the media!

***

The witch doctor is indeed a DOCTOR! Doctors in this country are exalted, placed on pedestals as the last saviors between sickness, pain and death. We worship them. We go to them hat in hand in our ignorance of our latest maladies in shrieking fear they will maim or kill us, and doctors make it all better and we want to hug them out of appreciation and gratefulness.

Doctors do not accept anybody taking them to task. They are in charge. They tell nurses and lab techs and anybody in their paths what to do and show up only to operate or diagnose, and very briefly consult. They are our gods, and if they’re good enough to heal us, well, like the witch doctor, they’re good enough to run the country.

But like all control freaks and egomaniacs, the witch doctor was not satisfied with his accomplishments and needed to embellish them further so nobody could ever question his greatness, his rightfulness, and when they did, he was outraged. As the inquisition from the dreaded, hateful, despicable media increased in its frenzy, the more grumpily the witch doctor whined and double-talked and denied; and the more angrily he condemned the media the more outraged his deluded evangelical tribe became and the more money they poured into his coffers.

The real and very famous Dr. Ben Carson is indeed a witch doctor in the political stratosphere, full of ridiculous economic and foreign policy nostrums and voodoo unfit for anybody outside of his deluded evangelical tribe to swallow. When it comes right down to it, he is the low-key evangelist mesmerizing his flock with the identical bullshit that has bamboozled those who want to believe for eons, the same evangelists who eventually get caught with prostitutes of either sex or the greedy feathering of their own nests with profligate spending on luxurious mansions, and profess their great contrition in tearful humility as their patient wives hang on and the disappointed flocks hang on too, believing the Lord forgives, and of course he does, just like he will the witch doctor when the country finds out what a complete fraud he is. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur. He’s the author of The Ball Player’s Son, a memoir about his father, Murray Franklin, and the early days of big league baseball. Visit his website: dellfranklin.com

Hillary & the Benghazi goon squad

by Dell Franklin

COMMENT.HILLARY*

Hillary maintained that arch calm, almost smiling at their little boy ineptitude and cry for attention, once flicking lint off her shoulder, as if signifying these men as no better than flies or gnats.

Elijah Cummings and Adam Schiff tried to come to her aid, but Hillary didn’t need them. She endured the inquisition, the steady bombardment of insulting drivel and accusations and falsehoods from the likes of Trey Gowdy and his menagerie of goons and held firm, displaying an arch calm and deliberate, articulate answers to their prosecutorial grilling, saying just enough but not too much, and what was evident in her demeanor was the bugaboo in theirs—lack of an unreasonable and bullying male ego, which seemed to be transfused into the two female members of the panel.

This ugly gob of male ego, always spoiling for a good fight and incapable of admitting defeat, pushed hard into the dinner hours trying to grind her down, but Hillary, like a slick shortstop from the Dominican Republic, kept fielding their vicious grounders and throwing them out with ease as they tripped over first base repeatedly and then kicked at the dirt and yelled at the umpires like sore losers, and little boys.

Hillary’s lack of male ego was what this miserable pack of jackals could not contend with. She exhibited no anger at their insinuations, their incriminations, only the same arch calm that held firm for eleven hours as they blistered her with one toxic salvo after another, one repeated, droning, boring question after another, one more strident hysterical raising of the voice, one more sententious play to the national audience for a little recognition as they became smaller and smaller, little men using a pea shooter to take down a giant.

Led by Gowdy, a man who resembles a hairless weasel with skin gloss and taped on ears, who looked like he was trying out for a John Grisham lawyer part in one of his novels turned into a movie. His two hit men, the wheedling, sneering Jordan and Roskam, played big for Fox News while Hillary maintained that arch calm, almost smiling at their little boy ineptitude and cry for attention, once flicking lint off her shoulder, as if signifying these men as no better than flies or gnats. All day long, as they tried to wear her down, she wore them down, until the whole sorry lot seemed to be talking to only themselves, like deluded sociopaths.

Hillary was too strong for them, too tough, too smart. And, fact is, because of what women have had to tolerate from men since the beginning of time, they ultimately have more steel in their gut. Just ask those who have tangled with Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Angela Merkel, who ate their male competitors for lunch.

I hark back to my own mother, a diminutive woman whom my father, war vet, professional athlete who played hurt and never missed a day’s work no matter how sick, said, “You think I’m tough? She’s tougher, believe me.”

My father, who grew up a Russian Jew in a German/Polish anti-Semitic neighborhood, where he fought every day and went on to become an amateur boxing champion, would punch anybody out who uttered anything derogatory about Jews, or used the kike, sheenie terminology around him. My mother, a Jewish lady with small, exquisite features and an IQ of around 160, had a far different way of dealing with such mean prejudice. She told me the story of driving across the country from Wisconsin to Norfolk, Virginia, where my dad was stationed in the navy before shipping out to the South Pacific. Dad had managed to arrange for the wife of a fellow navy man, an officer, to share the driving in dad’s Packard.

Mother agreed, and they set out from Madison, where the lady had been a cheer leader and debutante and almost immediately began informing my mother that the real enemy of World War II wasn’t the Germans, but the Jews, who were responsible for it. Roosevelt’s cabinet was infested with Jews. The Jews controlled the money. The Jews were greedy. The Jews this, the Jews that, the woman taking my mother for a gentile perhaps because she was so stunningly beautiful and perhaps not fitting the stereotype of what a Jew looked like in that era.

My mother said, “I let her go on. Unlike your father, I did not fly off the handle. She was spoiled and terribly entitled and she continued this kind of talk for an entire day. I still let it go. I remained calm and pleasant. I waited until we were about a hundred miles out of Norfolk, and when she started in again, I pulled over on the side of the road, and I just looked at her. I didn’t say anything for about a minute. And then I told her, ‘I want you to know you’ve been traveling with a Jew for the last two days.’ Well, I thought she might die right there. I cannot tell you how shocked she was, and how devastated she was when I just sat there and looked at her. I wasn’t mad. I just looked at her with pity and compassion for being such a narrow, shallow person who would never experience the privilege of compassion. She was from a rich family, I was poor. Well, she started apologizing, the poor thing was crying, she became hysterical. She apologized and apologized, and when she calmed down, she said, ‘but you don’t…look like a Jew.’ Oh, I said, what does a Jew look like?’ She cried and blubbered the last three hours of our trip.”

Mother said that the suffering this woman experienced those last one hundred miles was probably ten times worse than the damage my father inflicted on men who had uttered Jew-baiting remarks in his presence—several of whom ended up hospitalized. Mother said, “That woman will never forget that experience, and every time she thinks about it she will cringe, and maybe cry, and you can bet she will never repeat that business again.”

Maybe it IS time for a woman president, somebody without the kind of blustery male ego owned by an unfulfilled man like George W. Bush, who never played sports and ended up a cheerleader at Yale but couldn’t wait to go to war with his equally unfulfilled chicken-hawk pals. Maybe it’s time we had a cool, calculating, clever woman who’s been working her way around some of the biggest male egos on the world stage and in her own government and learned how to deal with them through thick and thin, victory and defeat, as well as the storm of bullshit they’ve thrown at her for decades.

You want tough? Just ask Bill. And now you can ask the Benghazi goon squad licking their wounds after getting torn up by this subtle tigress.

Bring ‘em all on, lady, they’re fair game. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur. He’s the author of The Ball Player’s Son, a memoir about his father, Murray Franklin, and the early days of big league baseball. Visit his website: dellfranklin.com

Blabber mouths and baseball

Broadcaster Vin Scully singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the traditional "7th inning stretch" during a spring training game in Arizona, 2008.

Broadcaster Vin Scully singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the traditional “7th inning stretch” during a spring training game in Arizona, 2008.

by Dell Franklin

I was nurtured and educated by a professional baseball player and former big leaguer from the age of 7 on, and because of this, whether I like it or not, the game throughout my 72 years has been an addiction and intoxicant, and for that I am grateful, even if it has distracted me from other more urgent endeavors and interests, though when all is said and done baseball probably takes precedent over politics, technology, the spread of nuclear weapons, gun control, the environment, more serious involvement in the economy, international intrigue, terrorism, and even my favorite pastime, boozing in the local pub.

So, since I live 225 miles from the nearest big league ball park and 100 miles from the nearest minor league park, and will scarcely attend a big league game anyway because of the hassle, and I’m not driving 100 miles to watch a minor league game, I watch a lot of baseball on TV, and feel blessed with Dodger and Angel games and ESPN and now the MLB.

What I love about watching baseball on TV is that I can work a crossword puzzle and read a novel or magazine and still watch the game, as long as I tune out these people in the commentating booths who will not shut up.

I do not need every intricacy of the game explained to me. I haven’t learned anything new from color commentators since Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver retired. Joe Morgan was no chatterbox, but, being a second baseman taught the game by the great Nellie Fox, he disclosed nuances and situations in a quiet subtle way, like an understated teacher.

McCarver, like Vin Scully, remained quiet when something exceptional occurred and let the scene play itself out. A former catcher, he made intermittent but very incisive comments in anticipating what was to occur, actually feeling the game at a gut-level and transferring it to the fan. I felt myself “thinking” the game along with McCarver. He was uncanny. He was not afraid to upbraid a player too dumb or selfish to play the game the way it was supposed to be played, or to expose the behavior of a hot dog desecrating unwritten protocol observed by ball players for over a century.

McCarver and Morgan were gems.

What we have now evidently are former players or former sportswriters perceived as experts who cannot shut up. The sports writers accumulate so much useless information and intrusive statistics you want to muzzle them. I like Tom Verducci, because, like most of us, he loves the game. But I don’t need him. Nor his ilk of excessive verbalizers on ESPN and MLB who never played the game.

More than anybody, I do not need Curt Schilling. Despite his tremendous knowledge of the game, he is a self-righteous know-it-all and oozes an authoritative and patronizing attitude that exclaims, “This is MY game, not yours, so listen closely and you might learn something.” I don’t like his goody-goody jingoism supporting war and maudlin displays of reverence for the troops. Leave that to the politicians.

Schilling, by the way, got in trouble with his opinions and has been temporarily replaced by a cliché-ridden female voicing the insulting obvious, no doubt the choice of ESPN corporate stooges obsessed with marketing. What they should do is clean house and stick the excellent Joe Buck with only Rick Sutcliffe, a knowledgeable and brutally honest ex-pitcher possessing the colorful personality and charm of one of his mentors, the great Don Drysdale.

In some cases, there are three people in a booth taking turns or talking over each other, squelching and smothering the game so that you have baseball tape flowing out of your ears, and then they consult the sportswriter down on the field with the latest trade or gossip or tidbit, and sometimes we have to look at them as they eat something you want, like a knockwurst smothered in onions and mustard, or as in Texas where these guys are wolfing barbcue ribs!

I’m going to miss Vin Scully. That cliché—“let the game come to me”—is Skully. Alone in the booth and needing no help, he early on establishes an easy flowing rhythm, a cadence, and drops fascinating incidents and anecdotes observed in the past that are attuned to what is happening. He does not opine, or critique, or explain, but points out, being too modest and humble a man to think he has the audacity to expound on the game and openly criticize a ball player, people he admires for their  courage and incredible skills to play such a game he, Skully, knows is so heart-breaking and beloved. What Skully does is drop hints perhaps alluding to bad baseball.

Skully’s storehouse of knowledge and subtle involvement in the game is so profound and organic that it is a part of him as it casually pours out like good literature or understandable yet eloquent poetry, never pushed or stilted or obvious or show-offish or created to fill space because the game is “too slow” and the viewer so empty and stupid he cannot see or feel the same things he does and needs constantly to be entertained.

Vin respects the fan, understands the fan, gives the fan credit for knowing enough about the game and is sitting alongside the fan with an imaginary beer and cigar, making the game a little easier for the fan, a little more enjoyable, and taking nothing away from it.

With the playoffs and World Series coming up, the coverage and commentary will be so overdone and saturated, so drowned in statistics and technicalities that one will wonder how a simple game could become so complicated. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur. He’s the author of The Ball Player’s Son, a memoir about his father, Murray Franklin, and the early days of big league baseball.

The pope’s shameless legions

COMMENT.POPE'S LEGIONS.DELLby Dell Franklin

Being a person who believes in no religion but has been taught to respect those who do and hoping they refrain from trying to convert or save me, I admit to liking Pope Francis very much as a person and inspirational leader and hope he can convert some of the scowling dumb-asses in this country to think about climate change and individual rights and the plight of immigrants, in whose shoes they refuse to place themselves in fear they might just start understanding their suffering and come to their aid, which would certainly infuriate their rancorous leaders demonizing them as criminals, terrorists and parasites sucking our system dry.

Amidst the pomp and pageantry of the pope’s invocations, the business moguls and politicians and glitterati of America fawn over and grovel before him in hushed tones like chastened sinners, temporarily humbled, and forgiven. Oh how magnificent they are in their new-found benevolence and humility. How wonderful it must feel; to be rich and famous and powerful and take time out from shitting on the little guy and bow before the pope and utter kind things about him when all the while you can’t wait for him to get his pious ass back to some place like the slums of Rio to pass his benedictions and blessings on to those poor saps who believe in his socialist bullshit and leave us to our merciless onslaught on democracy while we praise it as the savior of civilization.

The business moguls and politicians and glitterati of America fawn over and grovel before him in hushed tones like chastened sinners, temporarily humbled, and forgiven. Oh how magnificent they are in their new-found benevolence and humility.

When the pope critiques our capitalist system, he gets to listen to our conservative politicians and media pundits and heavyweight Catholics—the big time Catholics who for years ignored and denied the hideous rape of their children by their priests—explain how they “appreciate the pope’s deeply felt compassion and humility but he doesn’t understand our democracy and capitalistic system of government and how well it works for ALL Americans.”

Oh, he understands all right. He doesn’t see us as we see ourselves, does he, so inebriated are we with our greatness, our wealth, our reality shows of rich women getting drunk and squabbling over nonsense, our crazed hero-worship of athletic heroes in violent sports in over-priced venues, our descent into drugs of every kind at every level of society, our white police shooting black men down in the streets, our obscene narcissism in glorying in the trappings of material wealth, our hordes of mindless obese gobblers of artificial food, our defense of individual arsenals to supposedly fight our own feared government but that lead to monthly slaughters of innocent people, our enormous military power hogging money that could be spent on the needy as our homelessness spirals out of control, our meddling in countries where we do not belong with the propagandistic excuse it makes us safer and insures our national security, our massive and paranoid intelligence institutions that spy on us and warn us after starting these horribly tragic wars that “we know best, and you don’t, so trust us.”

This pope probably watches American television, which is everywhere, and observed a beaten down John Boehner, a good Catholic and former altar boy and basically a good guy, tormented by the hard-hearted zealots in his House of Representatives who want to cut taxes and eliminate regulations for the rich corporations and take away what’s left from the poor so as to “balance the budget and get the economy back on track.” Yeh, sure.

There is suspicion Boehner possibly, upon the visit of his pontiff, felt profound pangs of guilt and shame in meeting Francis while knowing he had been going along for four years with a bunch of bloodless pricks with no other interest but shafting the poor. So he quit, weeping like a kid who lost a Little League game.

This pope, if he can keep from gagging, probably turns on Fox News and watches the cruel expressions and listens to the cruel words of people like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and the rest of the rabble denouncing our black president as a Kenyan, a Muslim, a non-American, and, cloaked in the right language, “a nigger with the gall to think he can govern us old white fogies when the country belongs to us. The idea of this black bastard and his black wife and black children actually greeting the pope!”

Temporarily, the Marco Rubio’s and Ted Cruz’s and Chris Christie’s and Carly Fiorina’s and Rick Santorum’s take time out from their vicious attacks on any policies to help the needy to appear both proud and beneficent as they stand blessed by their beloved pope, so ensconced are they in papal purity. Meanwhile, their bankrollers, the Koch brothers and the Texas billionaires and the rest of that scabrous lot continue their assault on a country they’re trying to buy and wait patiently for this altruistic and obviously naïve pope Francis to get the fuck out of this country so they can take it over.

Trump, smartly staying out of this ghastly spectacle, bides his time, knowing that money talks and bullshit walks. He likes the pope, of course, might even consider him a good friend some day, wink, wink, somebody who might need a big fat donation down the line, ey? Get rid of that tin-can Fiat and step into my private plane, Frank…. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his dog Wilbur. His work can also be read online at dellfranklin.com.

 

 

Pope Francis in America

by Dell Franklin

COMMENT.POPE IN AMERICA3

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Our great author, John Steinbeck, who appeared to have little use for religion, might have liked this Pope. Steinbeck was all about the little guy who was not blessed with great physical strength, intelligence, drive and luck. He felt those who possessed these rare gifts should try and help those without them, for life and survival was so difficult, the world so merciless and unfair in many cases. I believe this Pope believes those with these gifts should be humble, compassionate and generous, not arrogant, greedy, selfish and inhumane.

So what must this Pope think of us, as a country, when he certainly observes our burgeoning oligarchy disguised as a democracy. What must he think about super pacs supported by billionaires like the Koch brothers, who despise our safety nets and wish to turn the entire country into a company town tossing crumbs to the over-worked peons? I had a political science teacher back in 1962 who warned our class that the greatest threat to our then thriving democracy was capitalism unchecked, in that it would evolve to the degree where money and material items and the trappings of wealth could become more important than our humanity.

So what must the Pope think of the mean-spiritedness of conservative Catholics like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and a few others so gorged with acrimony and persecution they actually want to de-fund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare, which have been created to help people without the means to help themselves and are therefore cast as parasites so un-American they are dragging down “America’s Greatness”? What must the Pope think of Donald Trump’s cannibalistic rhetoric, his racism, his bragging, his arrogance, his propensity to intimidate and make people feel small, and the mobs of strictly white hordes steeped in stupidity who idolize him and wish to see his ideas put into action?

Did the Pope see the Republican debates, where a Carly Fiorina displayed a hypocrite’s adoption of a lie to make her point about fetuses to curry favor with fanatics? Does he see people running for our highest office who are stooping to the lowest, most selfish and cynical common denominator so that in the end they can actually shaft these misguided and misinformed fools whose votes they seek? Did he notice those running for office in America fawn over him for political advantage and that their behavior is nauseating?

I’m sure this Pope assumes our people are good, not that we have become a crumbling empire ripe for demagogues, and that we are thinking only of our own self-gratification instead of the future of the planet and the concern for those with disease, are homeless, and who suffer daily and seem to feel they have no way out of their situations—here and everywhere throughout the world.

This Pope, who has rankled those bishops in the Vatican that have feathered their own nests with luxury and avoided confronting the sexual abuse of children by their priests and generally behaved like expedient politicians above the people, eschews the trappings of his mantle and associates himself with those who worship what HE, as Pope, represents.

What they should really worship is the man himself, Francis. One wonders, do those at the Vatican who for centuries reveled in the luxury, politics and pomp of their mantles despise Francis for so blatantly eschewing these rewards and driving around in a tiny Fiat? Do they feel he is embarrassing them, show-boating, and a fool? Or do they realize that Francis, having seen the world at its worst and walked among the downtrodden, would feel ashamed of himself to wallow in materialistic success while those still suffer. This Pope leads by example.

This Pope has an aura of greatness, such as we’ve seen in people like Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, in that whole civilizations liked and trusted these people and would follow them anywhere. Like those fore-mentioned, there is an inclination to feel Francis is one of those very mortal beings who come along once in a lifetime and is special and will make a difference if we just let him, if we listen to what he says, and follow him.

In Cannery Row, Steinbeck’s main character, and in many of his books his personal mouth-piece, Doc Ricketts, sits and watches a parade pass by in Monterey, Calif., and observes some bums and talks to a man named Richard Frost.

‘It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

The Pope would know where he stood with one of our greatest writers. Donald Trump and those running for office and fawning all over the Pope would probably call Steinbeck a crackpot and probable communist. What about the rest of the country? What do we really think of what Steinbeck said and what Pope Francis preaches as we exalt him? §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his dog Wilbur. His work can also be read online at dellfranklin.com.