Barack and Hillary, Together Again?

If the latest news reports are correct and Hillary Rodham Clinton joins Barack Obama's White House as Secretary of State, it would be a fascinating development in what has certainly been a long and winding -- and surprising --  trip for both figures. Talk about strange bedfellows.

The New York Times is reporting on its website tonight that former President Bill Clinton has agreed to a number of restrictions for his "future business and philanthropic activities" in order to the pave the way for his wife to become the nation's top diplomat.

Bill's relationship with Obama has been strained since he took on and pretty soundly defeated Hillary in a bruising and grueling primary. Full disclosure: I'm a big, big, big fan of Bill, but even I will acknowledge that he has not comported himself well, even when Hillary so graciously and completely threw her support behind Obama. 

Allow me a little pop psychology, but I think Bill is feeling guilty about stepping out on his wife back in the day, and figured the only thing that could make up for it was by getting her into the Oval Office. Now that dream seems gone -- if she were to run again, she would be faced with the near impossible challenge of beating an incumbent President in the primaries or wait eight years, by which time she will be pushing 70.

All this may be why all indications are that Hillary has ruled out another run at the White House -- she has even publicly said she won't run in 2012.  So, it would make sense then that she would consider a high-level job in Obama's White House -- an idea that until the last few weeks seemed near impossible to picture.  

Yet, there is still much debate on whether Hillary would or should take the position.  There are valid reasons for both arguments.  Secretary of State is a powerful position to be sure but she would be giving up her seat in the Senate, where she has a great deal of influence and would be considered as a candidate move up to a senior senate position, now that Robert Byrd has announced he's stepping down as Senate pro tempore for the next Congress.  (Note to Al Haig: that's number three in the line of succession, one spot before S.O.S.).  

I think a lot of this depends on what she wants to accomplish.  Certainly Hillary could cement a legacy away from the shadow of her husband as Secretary of State.  Reshaping the world and America's place in it after eight years under George Bush's ideologically-motivated and arguably failed Neo Conservative agenda,  would seem as daunting a challenge as rescuing the nation from a recession.

After all, the U.S. is involved in two wars, Islamic Fundamentalism is stronger than ever and Osama Bin Laden is still out there. There are fences to be mended among our friends and peace to be brokered with enemies and having a smart, strong, respected, independent force as S.O.S. is imperative. Whatever you think you know about Hillary,  she has a keen world view, developed in part, not only by her time as a Senator, but also from her experience as First Lady -- she's literally dined with kings and presidents. And whatever you say about Bill, it sure can't hurt to have as a sounding board, a two-term President who was beloved, not only in his own country, but all over the world -- and still is thanks to his philanthropic endeavors. 

If Obama's White House succeeds in righting the crippling errors of the last administration, it will be in large part to the key members of his cabinet -- State and Defense especially -- and also to Vice President Joe Biden, a foreign policy heavyweight.  Having Hillary Clinton has one-third of this triumvirate would seem to me to be an advantage.

UPDATE: It's apparently unofficially official -- Hillary has, according to the New York Times, accepted the post as Secretary of State.  Well, this should be a fascinating four years, not to mention the final nail in the coffin to the PUMA contingent. RIP, nutjobs.

Mr. President -- Don't Get a Pug

While I've been taking a sabbatical from this blog, we added to our family in a way. To our wonderful fawn pug (that''s him in the first image) , who we adopted from a rescue group three years ago, we've added the little guy below him, also from pug rescue. Introducing, Chamuco, the black pug. Chamuco was actually bought by a reputable breeder in Canada but his family couldn't keep him and gave him away. We got him when he was only 11 months old.

Just a note about his name. The name Chamuco came off of a tequila bottle in Mexico. Supposedly, it translates to "little devil." Our little devil is aptly named. It wasn't easy coming up with one for this guy. We tried a few. We thought "Dizzy" to go with Louie who is named after Louie Armstrong (I've also had cats named George & Ira and Sassy, after Sarah Vaughan. You get the picture). Naming the new puppy was a puzzle. The first one we settled on was Obama though my mother thought it might seem offensive to some people, the reality is that we were so into the election, it was all we were thinking about. I mean if the circumstances were different, we might have named him after Hillary. But it was all solved when we made that fateful trip to Mexico City and ordered tequila.

My friends will confirm my love for my dogs and, really, all pugs. Since we adopted Louie, I've grown into a huge fan of the breed. Pug people call it getting "pugged". In his election-night address, President-elect Barack Obama promised his two beautiful daughters that, following historical tradition, he would get them a puppy when they moved into the White House.

You'd think I'd love for the Obamas to adopt a pug. They are a fantastic breed. Loyal, yet independent and occasionally stubborn, they are very smart and lovable animals. They are brachycephalic and can have breathing problems but many live long and healthy lives. While some of them snore, I know many who don’t. My husband snores louder than my pugs.

Pugs are charming dogs, big on personality and yet small in stature. A latin term, multum in parvo, is often used to described them. Its literal translation is "much in little" but pug people like to say it means a big dog in a small package. This is an advantage for people who don’t have room for a larger dog but don't want the attitude or hyperactiveness of the other small breeds.

Yet, I don’t want the President’s family to have a pug. The problem with pugs is that they are challenging dogs. They require patience and attention and they aren’t the type of dog that is good on his own. They don't respond well to great variances in temperature, especially heat. Because of this and some other traits (they can have high-pitched barks and they tend to shed a lot for example) a lot of pugs end up in pug rescue or shelters.

After the movie “Men in Black” came out, pugs were suddenly in vogue. Everybody wanted to get one like Frank. But people didn’t understand pugs and more than a few gave them up or worse. My friends who have been working for years in pug rescues have had to deal with unwanted and abused pugs. They don't want to see anymore out there. Louie, our first rescue, is blind in one eye and deaf in one ear -- both from not uncommon pug ailments.

So, Mr. President, get sweet Sasha and Malia a sturdy everyday dog like a lab. Better yet, send a message to the unwanted dogs of America and get a mutt from the shelter.

But whatever you do, please don't get a pug.

RIP - Tony Snow

This is a tough one for me.

Tony Snow died today. He was 53. For those of you who don't know why he's front-and-center on the NY Times obituary page, read about him here. When Jesse Helms left us on July 4, I knew a bad man was gone and I had no qualms about feeling glad that he could no longer pimp his flaming bigotry. But this one is different.

I knew Tony. He was a mentor and a friend when I was a young journalist at the Washington Times. We sparred about politics and life and religion and sports and he was a good, sweet-hearted man who I came to admire and respect. That doesn't mean knowing him is all that takes for me to be okay with the part he played in the Bush revolution.

I mean when he left to be Bush 1's speechwriter, I wasn't surprised -- he was a Republican, after all. But when he eventually ended up at Fox News, it was a weirder, because when we were debating over lunch in the Times' cafeteria, he seemed closer to the center than the other Conservatives I knew.

I never was able to comfortably reconcile the Tony Snow I knew with the man who was a Fox commentator or later, the mouthpiece for an administration whose policies led to the death and injury of so many young Americans and countless more Iraqis.

And it's even more complicated than that. I was working for the Times when I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I think Tony had left by that time but he somehow found out and contacted me. Believe me, when you're young and you have Cancer, it's not easy for some people and I had many friends who couldn't reach out to me, for whatever reason. I've come to believe it's hard for some people to be forced to consider their own mortality. But Tony knew about Cancer and his words that day were backed up by the authenticity of having gone through the darkness and come out of it. We were connected by it and he knew this long before I did.

So, I can't say Tony was a bad guy. And yes, his support of Bush at a time when it was pretty damn apparent to even the True Believers that the war and everything that came out of it was a royal fuck up, a cost measured in blood and human lives, is going to be part of his legacy. So I can't say he was a great man, either.

That he was there for me, and others, that he loved his family and was good to them, that he was a good and decent friend to folks on both sides of the political aisle, is also part of what he leaves behind, and it's that part I'll choose to remember about him.

Everybody Has Cancer

S.O.L. Note: Please forgive the gaps in posts but S.O.L. has been felled by a very gnarly flu virus and has been recuperating by sleeping. All the time. Not since my college days have I slept so much during the daylight hours. I wanted to shoulder on as so many interesting things caught my attention in the last week or so, but I used up all my energy thinking about them. I’m still down for the count but the cleaning woman is here today so I had to get out of bed. So here I am sitting up at my computer, I might as well make a blog appearance. This was a blog I began last week after the news on the White House Press Secretary's cancer recurrence.

There's a darkly humor ous joke one of my Cancer doctors once told me they tell at the major hospital where I was treated. It goes something like this: A man runs in to the lobby off the street yelling "Help me! My wife is sick!" A kind nurse calmly asks him what's wrong. "She has cancer," he says. The nurse hands him a clipboard, "Everybody has Cancer here," he says.

Nobody ever explained the joke to me but they don't have to. It all makes perfect sense when you're a patient there and you've been told you might very die, that if you don't you'll lose your right lung and right there in the middle of your own private pity party,  you meet your new roomie, the mother of two adorable kids under five too sweet for words whose hand-crayoned pictures are taped to her suitcase who whose husband has decided now is a good time to move out, arrives with a shaved head and a broad smile, the night before her fourth brain cancer operation in two years.

See, as bad as that word must have sounded when you first heard it, you're suddenly aware that not only aren't you a lone but chances are someone out there has it really bad. Oh, and you're in the right place because if anybody knows what to do with Cancer, it's a place where the very term has become rote.  I like the idea of demystifying the Big C. The truth is we're curing it at higher rate than ever before and that there are something like 8 million people among us who are not only Cancer survivors but are living full and thriving lives. You might think Lance Armstrong as a superhuman exception but to a Cancer survivor, he is doing what the rest of us are doing, he's just doing it at a higher level.

Cancer has been in the news a lot the last two weeks. First Elizabeth Edwards' announcement (you go, girl) and then last week's revelation that White House spokesman Tony Snow's Colon cancer has returned and spread.

This blog isn't about cancer though. It's selfishly about me.

I knew Tony Snow back when we were both working for the Washington Times. He was the Editorial Page editor and I was a lowly staff writer. I always liked Tony. Truth is I sort of had a crush on him. He was just the sort of preppy Washington guy I used to go for and he was smart and funny and despite our wide political differences, we found common ground in the lunch room about issues that interested us, music, sports, stuff like that. I found him very human and even as he rose through the ranks along with a host of other conservative pundits, I watched his career with interest and, sometimes, rooted for him. It seemed to me that while he had right wing bonafides, he often seemed rational, like he'd thought stuff through, like he wasn't about spewing Karl Rove's talking points.

I'm not sure when that all changed, but it did. It wasn't a big surprise to me then when he ended up fronting for the Bush White House. I thought he would be different than the previous mouthpiece and in many ways he is. For one, he's brilliant and he can speak eloquently and there are times when I think reading between the lines, he has been less willing to lie outright, more understanding that even our current extremely gullible press corps. aren't going to swallow just anything.

But over time, I've seen a change in his demeanor, too. He's angrier and his attitude toward the White House press corps is more dismissive, like he's the schoolmaster and they're the unruly little rich kids who won't behave. Maybe this whole press secretary thing is just too soul-crushing for him. Maybe his humanity is taking a beating. Maybe he really is a good guy who is collapsing underneath the weight of so much ... twisting of the truth. Or maybe he's just he's a true believer now. Maybe he always was.

Should it matter to me now? It does and that's my problem here.

Back when I heard he had Cancer the first time, I sent a note to him (though I've no idea if he ever got it or even remembered me). I admit to feeling ambiguous about sending a letter now. Of course it sucks he's sick -- I wouldn't wish that on anybody. I truly hope he gets better but God help me, here's the rub. There's a part of me -- a big part of me -- that thinks sending him a get well card endorses what he does for a living, which I find morally reprehensible.

Politics morally reprehensible? I get it. It's all morally repugnant. Even I think Clinton was sleazy at his worst. I have friends who argue that all politics is like this, that almost none of them have any great ideas beyond those that help their re-election campaigns. That there's not much measurable difference between a Republican and a Democrat. Maybe he's right most of the time. But I say these particularly Republicans are different. They have changed the game in a way that sets them far apart from their counterparts (who I might add, let them change the freaking game but that is for another blog post). I say there comes moments in our history, personal and societal, when you/we have to make a choice between what is right and what is wrong. We have to cross a line, take a stand, call the bad people on their shit.

And let's be very clear here. This Administration is the most cynical of our generation. Whenever they got a chance to play dirty, reward a friend or punish an enemy, help a business crony or cover up the truth, the Bushies didn't hesitate. And think about this: if this is, as many experts claim, the most secretive administration in the history of this nation, then there's gotta be a whole lotta shit we haven't even heard about yet. That ought to help you sleep at night.

So I can feel bad about Tony Snow's Cancer and I can wish him well in my heart. But I'm not going to acknowledge it, I think. I don't know if I'm being rude or ridiculous or righteous but Snow made his choice and I'm making mine.