By Jeffrey Page

In the 20 months of the Obama Administration, the president and his allies in the House and Senate have been called every name in the book. The right’s sliming of President Obama has been constant, significant and, oh yes, breathtakingly false. Never forget the Bush factotum who declared that Sept. 11 occurred on Obama’s watch and that he is somehow responsible for the tragedy.

I’ve heard the president called a Marxist and I’ve heard him called a fascist – occasionally in the same sentence. He has been condemned as a socialist. He has been dismissed as a presidential pretender because he was not born in the United States, which of course is precisely where he was born. (Slight digression: If anyone in the idiotic birther movement raised a peep about John McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone, would he please step forward? And if anyone in the movement said anything about Mitt Romney’s father George – born in Mexico – when he sought the Republican nomination in 1968, could he raise his hand?)

The latest lie about President Obama is that he is a Muslim. The most intelligent response to this was as follows: “I wait for the day – perhaps when my young grandchildren are adults? – that when an official of the United States government is ‘believed to be’ or ‘accused of being’ Muslim, the response will be: ‘And?’”

The problem for Democrats is that this retort didn’t come from Obama or Pelosi or Reid or anyone else with a national constituency, but in a letter to the editor of The Times from someone named Susan Klee of Berkeley.

The left needs an army of Susan Klees, intelligent, fearless and articulate, but also angry and with runaway mouths. People on the left have been polite, well mannered, and cordial for far too long – and the right has cleaned their clocks. It’s time to fight back in a way that’s as forceful as the Republicans have managed ever since Barack Obama was elected.

Actually this form of defense and counterattack should have been instituted the afternoon of Obama’s inauguration. But the left was too busy being civil and accommodating and looking for bipartisanship. Ever try to find bipartisanship with a water moccasin? It was just four days before Obama took the oath of office that Limbaugh actually expressed his hope that Obama would fail – and got a free ride. Any outrage with Limbaugh’s bizarre view of citizenship and Americanism and love of country faded quickly.

Sure he’s obnoxious, and the left needs a couple of people just like him – people who are loud, relentless, and who have an audience that stretches beyond the Upper West Side. It needs its own Ann Coulter, its own Limbaugh, its own Sarah Palin. And it needs its own Newt Gingrich, someone who is always there, always available, always ready to comment. In 1994, Gingrich’s constant presence got the right the unobtainable – control of Congress for the first time in years. And it got the speakership for Gingrich.

Now it looks like the right may seize Congress again.

Hey, it’s 2 in the morning, time to take off the gloves, and ask the right wing to step outside and around back to the parking lot.

Would be nice if Obama led the way.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

At long last, it appears that the question of gay marriage is switching to an express track to the Supreme Court.

A pair of cases, decided last week in Boston, are not the emotion stirrers of tenant rights, sodomy laws, employment, adoption and health. Instead the cases were decided by an examination of the hoary Tenth Amendment, the last item in the Bill of Rights, which reserves all powers to the states if the Constitution doesn’t grant them to the federal government. So, the questions – Can two men marry? Can two women? – were answered not with ancient prejudices and irrational fears, but on a federal trial judge’s ruling that the Constitution says nothing about marriage.

Therefore, he reasoned, marriage is a matter for the states – several of which have already legalized same-sex marriage.

Specifically, Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled, the federal ban on same-sex marriage – contained in the Defense of Marriage Act – is unconstitutional because it violates the the 28 words of the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people.”

Declare war? Congress, not the states, is empowered to do that. Enter into treaties with other nations? Raise a Navy? Punish pirates? Coin money? Same thing; they’re matters for the federal government. But create an official definition of marriage? No.

The Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law 14 years ago by Bill Clinton, Last week, a judge ruled that DOMA has Tenth Amendment problems. It’s impossible to know how many people have been victimized by DOMA during its existence. I think of gay friends, dead now, who likely would have married if they’d had the opportunity. I think of them when I read newspaper stories about same-sex marriage and wonder what their lives were like with the knowledge that a political faction in the United States considered them less than human.

The Defense of Marriage Act is intellectually indefensible especially in light of that stirring business in the preamble to the Constitution about establishing justice, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. These were not, and are not, pretty poetry. They were, and remain, the glove slapped across the wretched face of tyranny. It will be fascinating to watch Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia jump through flaming hoops to craft a response to Tauro’s reasoning.

By the way, just who is this Judge Joseph L. Tauro anyway? Why, it turns out that he was appointed to the federal district court in Boston by none other than that radical, commie comforting, pink to the core socialist bum, uh, Richard M. Nixon.

Clearly, the matters that went before Tauro can never be concluded in his courtroom. Doubtless there will be at least two appeals, one to an appellate panel, and one to the Supreme Court, several of whose members have decried activist interpretations of the Constitution. And to find marriage where marriage does not exist, such as in the Constitution, sounds like the very definition of judicial activism.

For now at least, it is important to note that nothing unusual happened in the several days since Judge Tauro’s ruling. This should ease the terrible fears of people who believe that two men holding hands on Tuesday mean the death of America on Wednesday.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Photography By Rich Gigli

Gus

By Carrie Jacobson

I’ve made a number of these minimalist paintings of dogs and cats, and I have to say that I love them all, and this one in particular.

This is Gus, or Auguste Corleone Jacobson, my first dog as an adult. Before we knew about pet stores and puppy mills, before we understood about shelters and rescue groups, Peter and I went to a pet store and he bought Gus for me.

I’d never do that again – but I never regretted it, either. I loved Gus from the moment I saw him. He was as full of life and personality as any dog ever. We brought him home, and he raced around the house, faster and faster, barking at Najim, our Pekingese, and playing, and running and sliding on the floor, and then, all of a sudden, he collapsed, flopped right down, all four legs splayed, and dear God, I thought he was dead.

But no, that was just Gus.

He lived to be 16, and they were 16 fine years. He went fishing and camping and hiking with us in Idaho and Montana and Canada. He helped Najim recover from back surgery, finding a way to play that could engage Najim even during the weeks that he was paralyzed. When Najy was better, he and Gus would fight, on occasion, with a fury of barking and snarling and gnashing of teeth, and never any bloodshed or actual biting. Well, Peter and I were bitten a couple of times, wresting the tiny titans apart.

In Maine, the boys got to peeing around the house, marking territory, so we put them in crates when we couldn’t watch them. The crates were side by side, and after a while we realized that they were peeing on each other through the sides of the crates. Nice.

I still miss Gus. He loved to snuggle, loved to ride in the car, loved to go places and meet people. Our rescue bichon, Woodreau, is terrified of everything. He doesn’t like any of that stuff. But he is a nice little dog, and I love him dearly, and he desperately needed to be rescued.

But he is no Gus. And really, truly, he shouldn’t be.

By Jeffrey Page

Technically, this column is a mixed metaphor. Bear with me.

Somebody in Albany had the good sense to take a look at the state’s cash on hand and discovered it was $3 million – or about 15 cents per person. This is cutting things pretty thin. You know what 15 cents buys nowadays.

Governor Paterson understood the impossibility of this situation. No state can operate with such a threadbare treasury, especially if it wishes to sell bonds and even more especially if that state happens to be New York, the state of Wall Street, the financial capital of the world.

As a result, Paterson decided to withhold about $750 million in aid to the state’s municipalities and school districts. He said he wasn’t cancelling this assistance, but deferring it for now. He said he expects to be sued over his action, but so far he’s standing his ground. We shall see for how long.

So, as the state of New York teeters on the brink, let the howling from various interests begin. By the way, have you heard anything constructive from members of the State Senate or Assembly about the state’s wretched financial condition?

If the usual recipients of state aid are unhappy now, wait until the suspension of this assistance works its way down to the unhappiest people of all – the taxpayers. Schools and local government won’t be closed – and, in fact, we wouldn’t want them closed – but with cuts in aid to school districts and municipalities, it’s you, me and the guy next door who’ll be socked with higher taxes to make up the difference.

We’ve got to have that money to educate the children because the kids are our future and had nothing to do with making the current crisis, right? We’ve got to fund law enforcement agencies to keep ourselves safe, right? We have to fund Medicaid for poor people, right? We must continue funding our libraries, right? We want to make sure homeless people don’t freeze, right? We want the state parks to remain open for our enjoyment, right? It’s not even winter yet, but we want our highway departments fully staffed and equipped when the next snow falls, right? We’ve got to pay our municipal workers, right? We have to feed hungry people, right?

We’ve got to pay salaries to our elected officials, right? Uh, wait a second; hold that last thought.

Let us agree that it’s payback time. Remember earlier this year when the 62 members of the State Senate proved their incompetence as they forced the end of important legislative business by closing the Senate for a month? Remember how those ladies and gentlemen yammered about what they called “reform” and what the rest of us knew was lust for power?

Those geniuses in the Senate owe 20 million New Yorkers for their bipartisan temper tantrum, and so a modest proposal.

Governor Paterson could more than double the state’s cash on hand by withholding the $4.9 million that the 62 senators get every year. (Each receives $79,000, with members of the leadership getting a little more; would you believe it?) In this way, he could defer only $745,100,000 to the schools and towns. It’s a pittance in the great scheme of things, but wouldn’t it make you happy to know the senators are suffering some of the pain that we’re all feeling?

Let Paterson be sued. It would be refreshing to put a couple of members of the State Senate in a witness chair, under oath, and have them describe what it is they actually do to merit a salary 48 percent higher than the pay most of their constituents get.

The extra money won’t help New York much. But making life a little difficult, maybe a little embarrassing, for the members of the State Senate might be a lot of fun. Make them hire attorneys. Make them go to their in-laws for a loan to tide them over until they get a check from whatever it is they do when they’re not being senators.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

With one glaring exception, I’ve opposed capital punishment ever since I read Clarence Darrow’s autobiography in high school. Darrow, among others, has been credited with the observation: Hate the crime, not the criminal.

What I’ve learned about myself is that my mercy has limits, and that I find that in many cases I hate the crime and the criminal.

I veered from my moral comfort zone in 1995 when I saw a picture of Baylee Almon that came over the AP wire in the newsroom in Hackensack. Remember Baylee? She was the little girl – dead in the Oklahoma City bombing – being cradled in the arms of a burly fireman. She was 1 year old. Her face was pointed away from the camera, giving her a Christ-like appearance – like the vision of Jesus in Salvador Dali’s famous painting of the Crucifixion.

Her head was covered in blood. There was a bad gash on her right arm. It was hard to determine what she was wearing except for her bloodied white socks. Her legs, lifeless, dangled over the fireman’s left arm. I was not supposed to hate the criminal, but I hated him passionately.

Later there was a conviction. Timothy McVeigh would be put to death, and I wrote at the time that while I wouldn’t take joy in doing it, I would press the plunger of the hypodermic to carry out the sentence.

I concede that my reaction to McVeigh’s barbarism was emotional, not based in reason or compassion. Compassion? For McVeigh? Aside from Baylee’s, there were 167 more graves to dig in Oklahoma City. I justified my reaction to McVeigh and his crime by directing every ounce of my compassion to Baylee’s mother, to that fireman, and to Baylee. If not for McVeigh, Baylee Almon would now be 15 years old.

So I flunked McVeigh’s test. Once, I believed that capital punishment is never justified, if for no other reason than its irreversibility. And then, with McVeigh, I concluded that sometimes it is quite justified. Soon, I returned to that comfort zone, hoping that never again would I be so tested.

But now there are new tests, and in at least one instance, I’m failing again.

There is the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who acknowledges that he planned the attacks on America of Sept. 11. The result of his operation: 2,976 people dead, not including the hijackers. He too could face a death sentence if convicted.

So what does a restored death penalty opponent such as myself think?

I recall the catalog of Mohammed’s savagery. The hijackings; the slashings with box cutters; the unimaginable terror aboard the three planes being flown into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and the one plane crashing in that wretched field in Shanksville; people looking out their office windows and seeing a plane coming at them; the crashes; the fires; people jumping out of high windows to escape the flames; the prayers on the run; the rush to get down the stairwells; the buildings coming down; people still in the towers falling to their deaths, the panic in the streets as people ran for their lives.

I think about another baby, this one named Christine Lee Hanson, 2½ years old, who was flying to California with her parents Peter and Susan Hanson aboard United Airlines Flight 175. This was the plane that was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Mercy for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should he be convicted and sentenced to death? By the very extent of his cruelty and evil, mercy is not possible. I would press the plunger.

Despite that thought, I will, in this season of giving, write a check to the Innocence Project (100 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011), whose noble work in freeing wrongly convicted people – in both capital and noncapital cases – is exemplary.

I don’t like the moral position I find myself in. I still oppose the death penalty – usually – but I’m not as comfortably absolutist as in the years before McVeigh.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com