By Jeffrey Page

Listen and you can hear a nation praying for Gabrielle Giffords, and for a return to political conversation that doesn’t involve pouring gasoline on a fire. But instead of promoting such a dialogue, Sarah Palin offered a defense of her politics.

In the days since the shootings in Tucson, Palin’s friends have rushed to her defense, saying that her placing of a rifle scope’s crosshairs in 20 congressional districts on a map of the United States, including Giffords’ seat, had nothing to do with the attack on Giffords. That’s a coy response considering that those crosshairs came with the wording “We’ve diagnosed the problem. Help us prescribe the solution.”

But while the faithful remained faithful, Palin knew something about the public’s perception of her that her fans did not. So she removed the map from her web site and assured Glenn Beck in an email that she hates violence and war.

Palin doesn’t understand the power of rhetoric. Turning politics into a wink-and-nod message to demonstrate your toughness – “Don’t retreat. Reload” she once told her followers – is on a level of violence all its own. It coarsens us. It makes us ugly.

If Palin was sincere, she would renounce her retreat-reload message. She would also denounce the words of the infamous Sharron Angle, who lost her bid to unseat Harry Reid as senator from Nevada: “There are Second Amendment remedies.”

If Palin was interested in anything more than damage control she would tone down her rhetoric and distance herself from all the other political arsonists who see nothing wrong with incendiary language. Such as Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News. After Giffords was shot, and six others killed in Tucson, Ailes informed his on-air personalities – Palin is one of them – to calm down and keep Fox’s message civil.

Ailes’ order came just 53 days after he said of National Public Radio executives, “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude.” Nazis because they made the monumentally idiotic decision to fire Juan Williams for comments he made while appearing on a Fox interview show.

Palin finally weighed in on Wednesday. Here was her chance to embrace civility, to call for comity, to ask for calm, to deliver a message that might actually get people talking with one another.

Instead, she made herself the victim by identifying criticism of her political rhetoric as “a blood libel,” an expression used to describe the age-old anti-Semitic fiction that the blood of Christian children is required to make Passover matzoh. Pogroms began and countless people were killed as a result of this lie.

Say goodnight, Sarah.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

I studiously avoid the state lottery. Except when I don’t. Once a year or so, I’ll buy a ticket that guarantees $50,000 a year for life. A modest sum in Lottery Land.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday afternoon I stopped in at a gas station for a roll of Tums and noticed the handwritten sign taped to the door. Top prize in the Mega Millions game was up to $332 million.

It was like the Sirens singing to Odysseus and his crew. I went inside and found myself staring in quiet contemplation at another sign taped to the Lottery ticket machine. Tums in one hand, five-dollar bill in the other, I couldn’t move.

“Going to do it?” the fellow behind the counter asked. Friendly guy.

“I don’t really approve and anyway it’s like running your money through a paper shredder,” I said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. Friendly.

I thought about all I could do with $332 million. Start a foundation whose mission would be to figure out how to re-take America from the extreme right. I would issue college scholarships, donate large sums to certain green organizations I admire. I would send hefty checks to some food banks I’ve helped far more modestly in the past.

I wouldn’t embarrass members of my family by asking if they needed some help. But if any of them, asked me, I’d write a check. No question.

Oh, and I’d buy a modest place to spend the winter, somewhere where it doesn’t snow. I’d buy a lot of music, and a subscription to the opera. Good seat in the orchestra.

Hey, you know, this millionaire business could be a lot of fun. I bought a ticket. “I knew you’d do the right thing,” he said, laughing.

I just bought that one ticket and had very serious second thoughts as I walked back to my car knowing the lottery is wrong. But then I wondered how high a stack $332 million would be in all $20 bills. Pretty high, I thought. (I discovered later that it would be almost 6,000 feet high; you could look it up and do the math.) I was impressed, quickly forgot about my misgivings, concentrated on three-hundred-thirty-two-million dollars, and was happy as I drove home.

I looked at the numbers on my ticket: 1-7-9-10-19-6. All low numbers. Can’t be good. Wait, this time it’ll be good because think of all the people I’d make happy with some of my $332 million. They say that winners of huge lottery prizes often wind up miserable, despised by their friends and family. Not in my case, of course.

I checked the paper on Wednesday morning. 4-8-15-25-47-42. The winning numbers seemed about as far away from my crummy numbers as you could get. Goodbye, opera.

But today I am an unmiserable man. My dollar’s gone. But I am once again moral. I again think that dangling big money before the public isn’t an ethical way to run government. But see me in a few months when the top prize again goes astronomical. Maybe we’ll have to talk about morals again.

What about you? Do you approve of the lottery as a revenue raiser, especially now in these hard times? Tell Zest of Orange. Oh yes, and what would you do if you won a nine-digit jackpot?

Reach Jeffrey at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

The weekend blizzard that brought Orange County to a halt reminded me that January is the sixth anniversary of a lesser storm, but one that nevertheless closed the airport, stranded travelers, trapped cars and made life splendidly miserable for a few days in New Jersey.

I was at The Record of Hackensack then and got the assignment that editors love and reporters hate: The weather story. In the weather story, you’re given about 15 inches of space to tell readers what they already know. If the weather was truly lethal, a second reporter would write about that. But the overall story – Sir, how cold, wet and miserable are you? – was to be treated lightly, though never as lightly as local TV stations that love to toss in the ancient clichés like “Jack Frost,” Mother Nature,” and “the white stuff.”

You get strange looks from people when you ask them about the weather. They stare at you as if to say: How would I describe the weather? I hate it. Would I rather be in Key West? Yes, I would rather be in Key West. How do I manage to keep warm? I do not do so. Am I freezing? Yes I am freezing.

But inspiration struck in 2004. I put in a call to the Downtown Hotel and spoke with the manager, Rea Brandon who was taken aback when I told her where I was calling from and what I wanted. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re calling us because you had 10 inches of snow and it’s a little chilly?”

Uh, yes.

The Downtown Hotel is in Dawson in the Yukon Territory of Canada. It’s just 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It was 58 below zero in Dawson when I spoke with Brandon. A few days before I called, the city had gotten three feet of new snow in 48 hours. These were not records, Brandon said.

I asked how she deals with such cold and it turned out that her advice was what you’d hear in New Jersey. But up north, the matter of survival is not just an academic question. For example, dressing in layers here in the northeast makes for comfortable time in the cold. In Dawson it can mean the difference between getting where you have to go and freezing to death.

She said it was essential to stay dry. You had to wear a hat. Gloves were essential. A scarf. She said that when it gets really cold, like 58 below, it’s good to go to work in your car and leave the snowmobile for another time. She did note, however, that some eccentrics take pleasure in the cold and snow. Like her neighbor who traveled 14 miles to work every morning on a snowmobile and thus creating an unspeakable wind-chill factor.
Why did he do that, I wondered.

“No one asks,” Brandon said.

Still, when winter is its most severe, you must get out of the house. To never set foot outside is to risk serious depression. Brandon said you have to see people, go to a movie, even take a short walk. Just get out. Oh, and you can drink. Dawsonites drink a lot, she said.

The saloon in the Downtown Hotel offers the Sour Toe Cocktail, a concoction involving a glass of bourbon with a human toe in it. The story is that a trapper with a frozen toe cut it off to save his foot and later preserved the toe in a whiskey jar in Dawson. Some Dawsonites bequeath their toes to their favorite taverns to this day. Such activities keep people social, another important way to get through winter.

Advice posted in most Dawson taverns: “Drink it fast or drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe.”

I also spoke with Dave Buckerfield in Hay River in the Northwest Territories. He said he was thankful the temperature that morning was 31 below zero because this indicated a warming trend. It had been down to minus 42. The normal temperature for late January was 25 below.

Buckerfield said he deals with the cold by removing his gold earring every October because the metal would conduct the winter cold right through his ear. He puts it back in the spring. He, too, said keeping dry and covered are essential to preventing frostbite though he has had it several times. But people in Hay River do strange things. For example, in March, when spring is about to return and the temperature shoots up to a balmy 10 below zero, some people hang up their Mackinaws and go out in a couple of shirts.

Ten below in March makes people feel a little warm, Buckerfield said.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

A friend of mine just got a note from the president. In the guise of offering his best wishes to her for supporting the repeal of the 17-year atrocity called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Barack Obama mostly salutes himself.

He wrote, “When that bill reaches my desk [which it did], I will sign it [which he did], and this discriminatory law will be repealed.” Sorry, but I’m reminded of the expression about the guy who joins the cause one safe day after everyone else. He was, as you may recall, a day late and a dollar short.

I like Obama. I voted for him in 2008 and most likely will vote for him in 2012. I understand that doing anything to advance the constitutional rights of gay people is politically perilous. Still, Obama’s letter is weak. He applauds my friend but casually switches pronouns to the first person singular at every opportunity.

“The victory belongs to you,” Obama says. Nice. “Without your commitment,” Nice. “the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.” The promise that “I” made as a candidate seemed to have lost some of its urgency when “I” became the president.

There always was a reason to go slow.

Soon after he was inaugurated, Obama made clear that the repeal of this back-of-the-bus policy would have to wait, perhaps for more than a year because he had to discuss the change with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others at the Department of Defense. As if to suggest that generals, admirals and military chiefs of staff had not thought long and hard about the kind of time openly gay troops would have in the services. Substitute the word “change” in that first sentence with the words “granting of fundamental constitutional rights as Americans” and you could be astonished – shocked, actually – that the commander in chief decided he had to go slowly at all.

The reasoning was that granting such rights to Americans who wish to serve their country needed everybody on board even if those Americans would have to wait even longer for the right to choose any seat on the bus. Obama seemed to forget at times during 2009 and 2010 that he was the driver of that bus. He was the boss.

In May, Obama was advised that he could send Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell to the scrap heap by signing an executive order. He didn’t like that option.

So he waited for Congress to catch up, reportedly because he didn’t want to un-do Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell with the knowledge that a successor to the Oval Office could un-do his un-doing with a future executive order. As if politics would allow such a change to be made so cavalierly. But to reduce the possibility of such a political change back to Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Obama said he wanted the change to come in the form of legislation because Congress would not so easily un-do what a previous Congress and president had done.

In this, he seemed to go completely deaf to the fact that soon after the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, very serious talk began on the right that a GOP- controlled House of Representatives and a Senate whose Democratic control has been weakened should immediately take up the question of defunding and/or repealing national health care, the issue on which Obama spent most of his political capital.

It will be instructive to see how the legislation plays out in terms of how the military will deal with the same-sex husbands and wives of gay troops – issues of housing and dependent care come to mind – and how long it will take the Defense Department to come up with coherent plans for those aspects of the integration.

So we’ve finally ended the outrageous Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell policy and can look ourselves in the mirror. I’m grateful to Congress. I’m grateful to President Obama. But the self-congratulatory tone of his letter is a little over the top. After all, legions of good people have opposed this rule for 17 years.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

More tapes of Oval Office conversations during the Nixon Administration once again reveal his anti-Semitism and his loathing of blacks, Italians, and people of Irish descent.

Nixon an anti-Semite? A racist? Why am I not surprised?

In 1999, we were staggered by a tape on which Nixon, referring back to his early days in politics, declared: “The only two non-Jews in the communist conspiracy were [Whitaker] Chambers and [Alger] Hiss. Many felt that Hiss was. He could have been a half, but he was not by religion. The only two non-Jews. Every other one was a Jew. And it raised hell with us.”

And we’re jolted now with a later tape that captures Nixon expressing racist views regarding several ethnic groups. Doubtless we will be left slack jawed in the future when even more tapes from the famous White House taping system are released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. But we shouldn’t be. Nixon has, any number of times, proved his bigotry and displayed his twisted world view.

As reported by The Times last week, Nixon was holding court in early 1973 with Charles Colson – later Colson would spend seven months in prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal – when the conversation turned to the “traits” of various peoples.

Jews? “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality,” Nixon said.

Blacks? “Some of them are smart,” Nixon said.

Irish? “Can’t drink. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks,” Nixon said.

Italians? “Those people don’t have their heads screwed on tight,” Nixon said.

America voted, and for the better part of two terms was saddled with this thug in the White House and his paranoid vision of his own country and its people.

This was the man who felt compelled to tell the country: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

This is the man who kept an enemies list.

This is the man who waged a secret war in Cambodia.

This is the man who picked Spiro Agnew for his vice president, thus making them a unique team in American history – the only president and vice president to resign.

This is the man who appointed Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. After Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir asked Nixon to use his good offices to encourage the Soviets to allow more Jews to emigrate, Nixon and Kissinger discussed it.

Kissinger, who is Jewish, said, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Did Nixon fire Kissinger on the spot? He did not. He said, “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Reach Jeff at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Charles Rangel’s response to being censured by his colleagues in the House of Representatives contained the sounds of my childhood when a kid’s answer to a reprimand often was “But all the other kids do it and they didn’t get in trouble.”

It also reveals that this is a man who has basically told the House to go chase itself.

“ … we do know that we are a political body,” Rangel told the House in one-minute remarks after the censure vote. And then, without using the name, Rangel recalled the suffering of the man who preceded him in Congress. That would be Adam Clayton Powell. But Rangel, bemoaning the political nature of the House, didn’t tell the whole story.

Powell had his own ethics problems. It was in 1970, during Powell’s troubles, that Rangel declared his own candidacy – for Powell’s seat. Rangel won the primary and has been reelected every two years since, and Powell spent most of the next year and a half on Bimini in the Bahamas. He died at a hospital in Miami in 1972. Rangel omitted this coda to Powell’s career in his remarks about the politics of the House.

The House? A political body? Was there doubt? Ask any member who was around for the Powell episode or any member who’s around now. Politics? In Rangel’s case, it must be noted that while the current makeup of the House is 255 Democrats to 179 Republicans, the total vote on his censure was 333 to 79.

In the days after the House acted, Rangel tried to downplay his ethics breaches by cynically declaring that he was not guilty of some of the misdeeds that other members of the House have committed. “In all fairness,” he said over the weekend, “I was not found guilty of corruption. I did not go to bed with kids. I did not hurt the House speaker, I did not start a revolution against the United States of America. I did not steal any money. I did not take any bribes and that is abundantly clear.”

Well, as a matter of fact, nor did he murder anyone, commit arson, rape anyone, rob anything, lie under oath, or leave the scene of an accident. But that’s not the point. The point is that he violated the rules of the House. And a defense that leans on the notion that the other kids didn’t get punished is no defense at all.

The things he did do are the petty little breaches that serve to separate members of the House from the 300 million Americans who happen not to be in Congress. He failed to report income on a rental property he owns in the Dominican Republic. Not for one year but for several. He attributed this lapse to forgetfulness. Seriously, how do you forget income of almost $100,000?

Like all members of Congress, Rangel is allowed to send official mail without charge. But the House ethics committee found that he had used his postal privilege for other than official business, specifically to raise funds for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Policy at the City University of New York.

The list goes on. What are ordinary people supposed to make from Rangel’s failure to list $600,000 in assets on his Congressional financial disclosure form? He forgot? The dog ate his form?

In seemingly contradictory moods, Rangel said at one point he understands the House’s authority to police itself. And then, in one grand gesture of disdain, he told his colleagues:  “ … I know in my heart that I’m not going to be judged by this Congress but I’m going to be judged by my life, my activities, my contributions to society and I just apologize for the awkward position that some of you are in.”

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Allen Ginsberg was the greatest American poet. You could argue with me on that.

But if we sat in a room and read aloud from “Howl” about “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,” maybe I could convince you of his greatness.

Or we could read “Kaddish,” Ginsberg’s heartbreaking elegy to his mother: “She’d had a stroke – Too thin, shrunk on her bones – age come to Naomi – now broken into white hair – loose dress on her skeleton – face sunk, old! withered – cheek of crone – One hand stiff – heaviness of forties & menopause reduced by one heart stroke, lame now – wrinkles – a scar on her head, the lobotomy – ruin, the hand dripping downwards to death.” Could I convince you with that?

Recently, after seeing the movie “Howl,” I recalled that in 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning was constitutionally protected speech, an editor at The Record in Hackensack, where I was a reporter, asked me to get a comment from Ginsberg. I didn’t get a comment; I got a poem.

I reached him at his apartment on the Lower East Side. He asked me if I could type fast. I said I could. He dictated four stanzas. Citing space limitations, the editors chopped the last three, which included his reference to the Roman poet Juvenal’s observation that great nations often reduce themselves to longing for nothing more than bread and circuses. Also cut was a line in the first stanza because it contained a factual error: Patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels was not old American wisdom but from Samuel Johnson.

You may have read “Howl” and “Kaddish,” “Mind Breaths” and “Father Death Blues,” but you’ve never read Ginsberg’s furious response in full to the question of the phony politics of the flag-burning issue. Here it is:

“Old American wisdom: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. These vicious persons, including President Bush, are attacking the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, attempting to deface the laws of freedom that are America’s pride for the cheapest vulgarest political slobbish un-American motive since the Ku Klux Klan put on white sheets and burned crosses to scare black soul in America.

“Ayatollah went hysterical over blasphemy of his symbols. The president and his Republicans are sharing the degraded mentality of Deng Xiaoping and the mullahs in trying to suppress symbolic dissent by destroying the constitutional foundations of this republic.

“They should all be impeached and be thrown out of congress for their vile chauvinism, which only detracts from their own murderous behavior and narcotics smuggling in Central America. It’s a flag waving distraction from the fact that they’re doing nothing to stop the ecological destruction of the planet. Bread and circuses, indeed. If they taint the Bill of Rights and claim monopoly on the flag, maybe I’ll be the first to burn it because it isn’t theirs. It’s mine.

“My opinions will survive when they’re eating rotten worms in the grave. If they want to protect something, protect the oceans, the air, and the earth.”

He asked me to read it back to him.

“That’s not half bad,” he said and asked that we send him a copy.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

If in 25 years someone sits down to write about the demise of quality journalism in America, he or she might want to devote half a chapter to last Saturday’s edition of The New York Times.

Unlike some other big papers, The Times hasn’t fallen into the trap of spending its resources on the classic tabloid mix of gossip, sports, sex, news of television and movie industries, and Lindsay Lohan’s latest predicament. But then along came Page 1 of Saturday’s paper, and reasonable people are left wondering what flavor Kool-Aid the editors were sipping when, with one decision, they turned the front page into a joke.

The lead story Saturday was about a $625 million settlement of health claims by about 10,000 workers against New York City resulting from the Sept. 11 attack. An important story. Next to it was a piece about labor unions agreeing to dual wage schedules as a means of preserving their jobs. An important story.

There was a compelling story out of Port-au-Prince about Haitian canal workers joining the struggle to prevent the spread of cholera, an extremely important story that the editors buried at the bottom of the page.

It should have gone on top but was usurped by a story with this headline: “School Days Without Cuts or Cowlicks? Only in Pictures.”

School photographers, it turns out, are offering digital retouching of students’ pictures. Surely you agree that this story on Page 1 amounts to an unhealthy waste of space. The editors beg to differ; they allowed the reporter to write 33 paragraphs to tell her story. She focused on a towheaded first grader at Bay Ridge Prep in Brooklyn who went to school on picture day with a scab under his right eye, the result of a playground spill. The story then centered on the kid’s parents celebrating the photographer’s removal of the blotch, and wound up as a bizarre discussion of whether excising a kid’s blemishes is a form of revisionist family history.

Thirty-three paragraphs! And with this little fact tucked unobtrusively into the fifth graph: The practice of school photographers digitally retouching pictures of kids who don’t look so good because of their momentary or lifelong imperfections is about six years old. Meaning that story has been around since 2004.

Moreover, the reporter made a prep school kid her subject when there are 1.1 million other kids going to public schools in New York. They have picture day every year, too.

Note: The story about unions agreeing to bi-level wage schedules – an agreement that could foreshadow an extremely difficult time for organized labor in coming years – got 26 paragraphs. And the story about cholera in Haiti got 32, making it – in the freakish judgment of the editors – equal in importance to the story of parents worrying about one of the marks of childhood appearing on a school picture.

The next time some newspaper editors get together to bemoan plummeting circulation and readership figures, they ought to go back to Saturday’s Page 1. If they fail to understand that readers don’t like to be played for fools with garbage like that, they reveal that they are the fools.

Up here in the Hudson Valley, we pay $2 for a copy of the Times. For $2 we want news, not fluff about the inconveniences of the privileged class.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

According to a breathtaking story in The Times, Philip Morris International is suing the nation of Brazil because the government had the temerity to take measures to protect the health of its people.

Brazil did this by requiring that cigarette manufacturers print stark illustrations of the effects of smoking. Where? Right on the outside of the package where smokers could get a good look at what they inflict on themselves.

PMI contends that this serves to “vilify” – their word, The Times reported – it and other cigarette makers.

Smoking has decreased markedly in the United States and Western Europe, and to make up for their losses in those markets, Philip Morris International and other manufacturers are bringing legal actions against nations whose rules make it difficult to sell tobacco products.

Uruguay, for example, has a regulation that health warnings must cover 80 percent of the exterior of a pack of cigarettes. Other nations have rules governing the advertising and promotion of cigarettes.

I think back several years to when it was revealed that some cigarette makers boosted the nicotine level in their product as a means of hooking people more quickly and effectively, and I congratulate myself on breaking my nicotine addiction.

How insidious Big Tobacco has been. How devious.

 I remember when the maker of Camels used to advertise that a survey – did such a survey really exist? I have no idea – indicated that more doctors smoked Camels than any other brand.

The Old Gold brand used to bill its line as “a treat instead of a treatment,” and I wonder how many Old Gold smokers over the years have had to undergo treatments such as chemo, surgical and radiation. I wonder how many have died before their time.

I remember the line “Luckies taste better. Cleaner, fresher, smoother,” and the invitation “Light up a Lucky. It’s light-up time.”

The ads were happy, colorful portrayals of life in post war America. Everything was clean, everything was sparkly. And just to make it perfect, we were advised to light up, sit back and enjoy life. We were killing ourselves of course, aided every inch of the way by the cigarette makers.

And thus, getting back to Philip Morris International’s weepy complaint that it is being vilified by having to follow certain rules, let it be noted that to vilify is to defame, to revile, to speak contemptuously, to speak ill.

Was there ever an industry more deserving of vilification than one that sells a product it knows to be lethal?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The Republican victory was not yet two days old when Michele Bachmann informed the House GOP leadership that she wants a piece of the pie by being named the party’s conference chairwoman when the 112th Congress convenes in January.

In most other countries – with the possible exception of Saturn – Bachmann’s ambition would be considered a joke. Bachmann is the Minnesota backbencher whose brain and mouth have never quite connected as evidenced by her bizarre request to the press a few years ago. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” she said. Listen carefully and you can hear Joe McCarthy whispering, “That’s my girl.”

Bachmann, a two-term member of the House, is a favorite of the Tea Party movement and thus has some clout. Many Tea Partiers believe – with good reason – that they helped make the difference on Election Day and that because of them, the Republicans have the House. (Of course, they don’t talk much about their failure – Angle, O’Donnell, possibly Miller in Alaska, et al. – to take over the Senate.)

Maybe the Tea Party people have a legitimate claim to a place in the House GOP leadership. But Michele Bachmann? Michele Bachmann, who informed CNN listeners last week that President Obama’s Asian trip is costing $200 million – a day. That Michele Bachmann?

John Boehner, the next Speaker of the House, has a problem with her that rivals the Democrats’ dilemma of 2000. Ten years ago Democrats watched as many of their members gave up on Al Gore and cast their lots with Ralph Nader. As a result, we got two wars and lost several thousand of our young men and women. We watched New Orleans nearly float off and sink. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney and their idiotic mission to find Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. We got Chief Justice John Roberts.

Good old St. Ralph.

And now, Boehner must deal with his fringe, which, like Ivory soap and the Gore defectors, considers itself 99 and 44/100 percent pure. And he must be careful. Never forget that during the campaign, any number of Tea Party activists were quoted as saying they may despise the Democratic Party, but they’re not at all crazy about the GOP either.

Message to Boehner: Watch your back because here comes Bachmann and her demand for respectability, and here’s Boehner who understands he’s got to do something to calm her down. But he can’t hand the GOP over to her and her Tea Party allies. How about a committee chairmanship? Then again, maybe not. The heads of congressional committees must at least pretend that they’re listening to the minority. But it was Bachmann last year who declared: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

How about an interesting lie? Because you know damn well that Bachmann knows damn well that the president at the time of the flu outbreak of 1976 wasn’t Carter the Democrat but Ford the un-Democrat. And of course she blames the more recent flu outbreak on President Obama.

How can House Republicans ever be thought of as anything but the Party of No if Michele Bachmann gets a leadership position? After all, it was Bachmann, speaking on health care, who said, “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

So far, Boehner is resisting Bachmann’s demands It will be interesting to see how long he can ignore her once the Tea Party activists organize around her.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.