Silent Minority

Robert Michel, one of the last remaining vestiges of political bipartisanship, has died of complications of pneumonia at the age of 93. A World War II veteran who earned two Bronze Stars and four Battle Stars plus the Purple Heart when he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, Michel was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois and served for 38 years. A conservative by nature, Michel sought to govern through compromise rather than confrontation. Elected during a four-decade period of Democratic control of the House, the courtly Michel maintained friendships on both sides of the aisle, including House Speakers Tip O’Neill and Tom Foley, which served him well when he became minority leader in 1981 and was tasked with shepherding the policies of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush through Congress. He was dismayed by the late ‘80s-early ‘90s rise of conservative firebrands like Newt Gingrich more interested in winning than governing, more interested in slogans and sound bites than common ground. When Gingrich indicated he planned to challenge Michel for the Republican leadership position in 1994, Michel chose capitulation rather than trying to preserve the integrity of the party and retired from the House, helping to set the United States on the path to the dysfunctional mess that we currently call our political system. On his way out the door, he criticized the growing incivility of Republicans who focused on “trashing the institution” for political gain. Bill Clinton honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for “[serving] our nation well, choosing the pragmatic but harder course of conciliation more often than the divisive, but easier, course of confrontation.”  

Glenn Gray, Glenn Lost

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Astro-Not

 Or

Space Ghost

John Glenn, one of the few men brave enough to tease Ted Williams, has died at the age of 95. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Glenn joined the Marines and flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific, earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses, then flew 90 more in the Korean War, where he had Williams as a wingman. On one mission, Williams’ plane was in flames, and Glenn flew alongside, motioning for him to fly higher, where the diminished oxygen extinguished the flames. Glenn took on even more dangerous missions testing supersonic jets, then applied to become one of NASA’s first test pilots. One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, Glenn took the leap into the unknown and became the first American to orbit the earth. The flight was short, but was seen as a victory in the Cold War for space, making Glenn more valuable as a symbol than as an astronaut, so he was grounded for PR appearances. Spinning around and ending up in basically the same place prepared him for the next phase of his career – the US Senate, where he represented Ohio for 24 years. He eventually got a return flight, boarding the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998 to become the oldest man in space, apparently to test the effects of weightlessness on old man testicle droop. Perhaps his most impressive achievement coming from an era when astronauts had the sex appeal of rock stars and the morals to match, Glenn stayed married to Annie, his high school sweetheart, for 73 years.

Not Spinning in Her Grave

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Reno 911… Too Late

Janet Reno, who allegedly was the United States’ first female Attorney General, and was definitely its 2^nd longest-serving, has died of complications of Parkinson’s at the age of 78. After time as the State’s Attorney for Dade County where her controversial way of gathering evidence led to acquittals for a number of child abusers, her spinster status allowed her to avoid the undocumented nanny issues that thwarted the nominations of President Clinton’s first two choices. She vowed that she ‘didn’t do spin’ in discussing her job, so among the highlights of her tenure were the successful killings of David Koresh and 85 other Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the persecution of Ted Kaczynski, America’s favorite Luddite, including Reno’s violation of his copyright on his Manifesto; the aggressive opposition to the urban renewal efforts of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in Oklahoma City; challenging the idea that any press is good press by suggesting Richard Jewell was the Olympic Park bomber, not the hero whose quick actions saved countless lives and the touching reunion of Elian Gonzalez with his father in Cuba at gunpoint. She was defeated in the primary while running for governor of Florida, and devoted the rest of her life to dance parties. 

I am Woman, Hear me Rot. As Long as all the Men are OK with it.

Phyllis Schlafly, who had the audacity to put on shoes and leave the kitchen, has died at the age of 92, thus denying her the right to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s loss, so at least that’s something. Among Schlafly’s betrayal of the sisterhood was her opposition to women’s rights and equal pay, abortion, sex education and women in the military, and she helped kill the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been ratified by 25 of the necessary 35 states before she got involved. She blamed women for domestic violence, discounted sexual harassment and said married women can’t be raped by their husbands. Lest women get all the hate, she also opposed gay rights, didn’t believe in evolution, argued that forcing fathers to pay child support didn’t benefit children and said, “The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.” Despite her unrepentant craziness, in her day the John Bircher was quite influential. Her 1964 book A Choice Not an Echo rejected the liberal wing of the Republican party and called on conservatives to take the party back, helping Barry Goldwater to secure the nomination and the worst whupping in a presidential election in US history.

Not All He Was Cracked up to Be

Rob Ford, whose political career was one crash through a coffee table away from being a Chris Farley biopic, has died of cancer at the age of 46. In a related story, Canada announced it had won its war on drugs. Canada’s Marion Barry served 3 terms as city councilor, during which time he fought with colleagues and the press, maligned people with AIDS and cyclists – but praised hard-working “Orientals” – and was rewarded by being elected mayor of Toronto in 2010. One of his campaign themes was that "Toronto's government has grown bloated and wasteful," taking advantage of Canadian’s inborn decency to not point out the irony. After a number of public intoxication incidents and several incidents of spousal abuse he truly tested the limits of that decency by dragging the country through a scandal centered on his desire to drink, smoke or shoot whatever he could get his meaty paws on. After first denying all allegations, he eventually admitted to public drunkenness, drinking and driving and illegal drug use, though he explained away his smoking crack by postulating that it probably occurred during one of his drunken stupors. Protip – if you have so many drunken stupors that you lose count, and use one of those drunken stupors as an excuse for smoking crack, you may have a problem. Under the bizarre laws of America’s hat, Toronto’s City Council could not remove Ford from office, but was able to strip away most of his mayoral authority. He at first planned to run for re-election, but the discovery of an abdominal tumor led him to scale back to trying to reclaim his City Council office, with his ever-polite Canadian constituency obligingly re-electing him.

Bonn Voyage

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Schmidt Outta Luck

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Dark Helmut

(Props to Mark)

Helmut Schmidt, who fought the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front and then again in Central Europe, has died at the age of 96. Kicked out of the Hitler Youth, Schmidt nonetheless was drafted into the military, serving in such pointless German campaigns as the Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of the Bulge before being captured and sitting out the end of the war in a POW camp. During his political career, he continued the German tradition of ignoring the constitution, calling on federal troops to assist during a flood. He was named Chancellor in 1974 after Willy Brandt’s resignation due to the revelation that an East German spy ring was operating with impunity in West Berlin. Schmidt was an early advocate of a united Western Europe, even before Germany itself was reunited. Concerned about Soviet missiles in Central Europe, Schmidt convinced NATO to threaten to expand its own missile stockpile if the Soviets did not withdraw. The stance was unpopular at home and by 1982, Schmidt was ousted in a vote of no confidence. 

Super Mario Smothers

Mario Cuomo, who hit .244 for the 1952 Brunswick Pirates of the Class D Georgia-Florida League, has died of heart failure at the age of 82. He also governed a little. The three-term New York governor was a liberal icon and his passionate keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention attacking the policies of President Reagan rallied the party to avoid a complete shutout as Walter Mondale carried Minnesota. It being his home state also may have helped. Widely viewed as the front-runner for the nomination in 1988 and 1992, Cuomo was twice scared off by the personality juggernaut of George Herbert Walker Bush. Defeated by George Pataki in 1994, he retired from public life, telling Bill Clinton he wasn’t interested in being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999 moments before he was tapped.

Marion, Buried

(Props to Monty)
Marion Barry, inspiration for the character of Rob Ford, has died of a heart attack at the age of 78, about the only thing that would preclude him from holding elected office in Washington. A prominent civil rights activist who organized the Nashville Student Movement sit-ins and then served as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Barry was elected as the second Mayor of the District of Columbia in 1979. All was going mostly swimmingly, except for some skimming and no-bid contracts for his buddies, addictions to booze and cocaine fueled in late-night binges that left him asleep at his desk (Of course, in his defense, "First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl.") His subsequent inattentiveness hindered city services, as city crews mismanaged a blizzard clean-up (He later commended how “The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather.”) and police officers lacked cars to get to crime scenes, contributing to a skyrocketing homicide rate. (Though Barry explained that “If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate.") Then the Bitch set him up and he was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room, leading to his arrest by the FBI and a 6-month conviction for possession. He took a sabbatical from the Mayor’s office in federal prisons in Petersburg, Virginia (where he was alleged to have gotten conjugal in a waiting room) and Loretto, Pennsylvania, before being returned by a forgiving electorate in 1995. He left office again in 1999, but the Mayor for Life returned to represent Ward 8 on the Council of the District of Columbia from 2005 to 2014, declining to pay taxes during any of that time. Among the highlights of his tenure were racial epithets against the Asian-American business community in his Ward, then referring to “Polacks” during his apology for said comments, ironic given his assertion that “The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist.”

Goughing My Way?

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Down Under

Gough Whitlam, the only Australian Prime Minister to get fired, has died at the age of 98. Whitlam led his Labor Party to the PMship for the first time in 23 years when he was elected in 1972. His public service began in 1952, when he was elected to Parliament, and after a narrow loss in 1969, got to tell all the Bruces and Sheilas what for. Though brief, Whitlam’s term as PM was significant – ending the draft, starting universal health care and free university education, starting land reform for the Aborigines, abolishing the death penalty and implementing the One Family, One Koala policy. In 1975, the Opposition-controlled Senate delayed passage of appropriation bills, effectively shutting down the government. Governor-General Sir John Kerr rewarded the tactic by sacking Whitlam faster than a moose-obsessed subtitlist and elevating the Opposition leader to prime minister. For those who thought that obstructionist tactics only bore fruit in American politics. After consecutive drubbings in national elections, Whitlam retired as leader in 1977 and left Parliament in 1978. His dismissal remains a much-discussed constitutional crisis, with the legality never fully determined, and more books have been about his written about his term than about any other Australian prime minister.

A Little Spring De-Thatching

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Conservatively Cadaverous

(Props to Chris Nicholas)

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Ding, Dong! The Witch is Dead

(Additional accolades to Chris Nicholas, quoting the streets of London)

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Tramp The Dirt Down

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Labour’s Loathed Lost

Margaret Thatcher, the sex-starved boa constrictor of English politics who was once offered Jacques Chirac’s balls on a tray, has died at the age of 87. Like Ronald Reagan, her conservative partner in international crime during the 1980s, a long career of mental strain to elevate the Soviet Union into something more than an outdated, failing monolith and to convince herself that relentless oppression of the working class and tax cuts for those least in need of them was the best means to a healthy economy left her with significant dementia in her later years. Elected as a Member of Parliament in 1959 and elevated to a Cabinet post in 1970 where she took away free milk for school children, Thatcher would become the only woman Prime Minister in the history of the United Kingdom, and her tenure from 1979 to 1990 is the longest of any Prime Minister in the 20th century. After her election in 1979, she took on the struggling UK economy by emphasizing deregulation, privatizing state-owned companies and diminishing the power of the trade unions, resulting in worsening recession and high unemployment. To boost her popularity, she took on Argentina and held onto the Falkland Islands, earning her a second term in 1983. She fought efforts for Scotland and Wales to develop their own Parliaments and her battle with the miners union cost the UK £1.5 billion, tens of thousands of jobs and devastated communities. International highlights included not supporting efforts to isolate the South African government in order to end Apartheid while supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge’s bid to hold its UN seat after it had been evicted from Cambodia. By 1990, her combative nature, the Conservative’s 18-month losing streak to Labour and the lack of a 3rd World Nation’s navy to destroy, Thatcher was forced to resign as PM.

Caracasket

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Victim Hugo

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No Oil for Joe!

(Props to interested observer Shawn)
In a nod to the Monroe Doctrine, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has died of cancer or its complications at the age of 58. The fiery populist blamed capitalism for destroying life on Mars as part of his Latin American socialist revolution. After leading a failed coup as an army paratroop commander in 1992 he was jailed, and after he was pardoned in 1994, his countrymen decided to reward his creative approach to patriotism by electing him president in 1998. Through strong-arm tactics he held power for the next 14 years, winning 2 more elections as fairly run as your typical Internet vote with opponents and opposing viewpoints being suppressed or disappeared, and surviving a coup attempt in 2002. Chavez built a broad power base among the nation’s poor by using his nation’s oil revenues to launch social programs, including subsidized stores, public housing and free health and education programs. While doling out fish, he neglected to provide poles, and the country’s economy stagnated while the homicide rate skyrocketed. He proclaimed himself a successor of the revolutionary Simon Bolivar, whose sword he would wield at public events before launching into performances of folk songs and tributes to Mao Zedong and Friedrich Nietzsche. He made friends among the world’s rogue states in 2006 when he called President George W. Bush the devil and claimed the podium still reeked of sulfur after Bush's address at the United Nations. His efforts to support the underprivileged, including a low-income oil program for the suffering indigents of Massachusetts, won him praise among rogue Americans like Sean Penn, who said that “America had lost a friend it didn’t know it had.”

Surgeon General's Mourning

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Flown the Koop

(Props to Shawn)

Or

The Koop de Grace Has Been Delivered

(Kudos to Chris N)
C. Everett Koop, the only unindicted member of the Reagan Cabinet, has died at the age of 96. An early casualty in the Republican war on science and reason, he was pilloried by conservatives for suggesting that education and condoms could do more to stem the spread of the AIDS epidemic than ignorance and prayers. Although the deeply religious Koop opposed homosexuality, he insisted that young people did not deserve a death sentence because they didn’t know how the virus spread. Originally appointed because Reagan thought he would use the office to condemn abortions, Koop refused to make his office about his religion, declining to issue a report requested by the administration about the harmful psychological effects of abortion on mothers, citing the complete lack of compelling evidence. Koop also didn’t win any friends by taking on Big Tobacco by blaming “the merchants of death” for more than 300,000 preventable deaths a year and forcing cigarette packaging to bear the Surgeon General’s warning. Before Koop, the Surgeon General was a thankless job with a miniscule budget and even less authority. Koop used his bully pulpit to establish himself as the nation’s moral authority, with his Amish-style beard and dress uniform helping convince the nation that anyone that square must be legit.

How’m I Dying?

(Props to Greg)

 

Or

How'd I Do?

Ed Koch, who started the conversion of New York’s Time Square from crime-ridden hellhole to tourist-infested hellhole, has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 88. In the 1980s, the only thing New Yorkers could agree about more than their smug and undeserved sense of superiority was Koch, as the lifelong Democrat won re-election in 1981 with 75% of the vote and 78% in 1985. Like most politicians of the 1980s, he was embarrassingly negligent in recognizing and reacting to the AIDS epidemic. Given the tabloid speculation about his own sexuality, this could have been either a betrayal or a means to avoid further scrutiny of it. In any event, can having fewer New Yorkers ever really be considered a bad thing? When the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in 1986, he refused to accord them the honor of a ticker tape parade because the team had moved to (and paid taxes in) New Jersey, declaring, "If they want a parade, let them parade in front of the oil drums in Moonachie."

 

Ferraro Restarossa

Geraldine Ferraro, who fell just 253 electoral votes shy of becoming the first female vice president in U.S. history, has died of cancer at the age of 75. The three-term Congresswoman from Queens blazed a trial for inexperienced women selected as token eye candy by overmatched men later followed by Sarah Palin and Kelly Ripa. Only the fact that she was unqualified, had a husband who didn’t feel obligated to pay taxes and had mob ties and that her running mate Walter Mondale was bland and ran on a platform of raising taxes kept them from stopping the Reagan Revolution.

Warren, Peace

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Un-Warren-ted
Warren M. Christopher, who as President Clinton’s Secretary of State didn’t stop the genocide in Rwanda, didn’t enact a road map to peace in the Middle East, gave away the Panama Canal, and didn’t address China’s human rights violations and favorable trade status, then as an Al Gore operative couldn’t find a more compelling VP candidate than Joe “Droopy Dog” Lieberman and failed to secure a legitimate outcome in the recounting of the 2000 presidential election, has died of bladder and liver cancer at the age of 85. Christopher had previously served as Deputy Secretary of State under President Carter, and was passed over when Cyrus Vance resigned in protest over the failed rescue attempt of Iranian hostages. Christopher eventually secured their negotiated release for the hostages, giving his old boss the finger by making the day of their release his last in office. Among his successes were negotiating an end to the Balkans conflict after years of ignoring genocidal bloodshed, giving Jordan $1 billion to acknowledge Israel, restoring Jean-Bertrande Aristide to power to help make Haiti the thriving success story it is, and securing Poland’s place in NATO, pissing off Russia, but giving George W. Bush a powerful second ally in his war against Iraq after the United States was attacked by Afghanistan-based terrorists.

No Time for Sargent

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Peace Corpse

Or
Sargent Slaughtered
R. Sargent Shriver, the bitch of two generations of California and Massachusetts politicians, has died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 95. The graduate of Yale and Yale Law won a Purple Heart in the Navy, then worked as an editor at Newsweek, where he met Eunice Kennedy. Joe Kennedy then hired him to run Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest commercial building, in Chicago, and after a 7-year courtship, Shriver married Eunice, ceding control of his life to the Kennedys. Although the family thwarted his hopes to run for governor of Illinois in 1960 and VP in 1964 and 1968 to focus on other priorities, brother-in-law Jack let him clothe the world’s unwashed as the founding director of the Peace Corps in 1961. He pissed off the family by sticking with Lyndon Johnson’s administration, as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the lead on Johnson’s war on poverty through programs like Head Start and Job Corps, then as ambassador to France. Somehow being a hippie freak who likes poor people and the French did not endear him to the American people and he had a front row seat to the Richard Nixon ass kicking as the 1972 Democratic VP candidate, having replaced Crazy Tom Eagleton as George McGovern’s running mate. A 1976 presidential campaign was crushed early by the Carter Charisma Crusade, and he had settled into a retirement as an elder statesman until daughter Maria brought home a huge pile of German sausage that would eventually become the state’s governor. Eager to forget having Arnold Schwarzenegger as a son-in-law, Shriver developed Alzheimer’s Disease, leading Maria to heap on the humiliation with the book “What’s Happening to Grandpa?,” and the documentary, “Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?”

From Answering to the Ward Boss to Answering to the Warden

Dan Rostenkowski, who maintained the finest standards of Chicago politics, has died of cancer at the age of 82. In the halcyon days when elected leaders reached across the political aisle to line their own pockets instead of adhering mindlessly to partisanship, Rostenkowski was among Congress’ most skilled practitioners, parlaying his deal making skills into the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, but his interest in philately helped usher in the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. Federal investigators determined that he had bought $22,000 in stamps from the House post office with public money and converted them to cash, had 14 no-show employees on his payroll, and used office expense account to charge $40,000 in furniture, fine china and crystal among 14 counts that led to 15 months at Club Fed.

Flight to Nowhere

Or
Down the Tubes
Ted Stevens, the anti-Al Gore, has died in a plane crash at the age of 86. Stevens was instrumental in helping secure statehood for the Last Frontier, affording himself the opportunity to rape the land and secure billions of taxpayer money for the unpopulated wilderness and hundreds of thousands for himself; all the while keeping an eye on Russia. The longest-serving Republican senator ever represented the caribou and Eskimos for 40 years before losing his seat a week after a DC federal jury convicted him on seven felony counts related to more than $250,000 in illegal gifts. This was a nice bookend to his career, as his lobbying efforts for statehood while he was a lawyer for the Interior Department were also a violation of federal law. He was defeated by Nick Begich, Jr., whose father was serving Alaska in Congress when he died in a 1972 plane crash. Stevens himself had barely walked away from a 1978 plane crash that killed his wife, suggesting a relationship between Alaskan politicians and airplanes rivaling that of Rocket Romano and helicopters. Stevens never failed to remind Alaskans they came from a meaningless backwater and would be lost without him, in part through the works of the Ted Stevens Foundation, a charity established to "assist in educating and informing the public about the career of Senator Ted Stevens." These efforts included innumerable pork barrel projects that netted more federal dollars per capita than any other state – 1,452 earmark projects and $3.4 billion since 1991, including a $3.5 million airport to service an island populated by 100 people (and a seafood processing plant that donated heavily to Stevens’ PAC), and of course the proposed $400 million Bridge to Nowhere, which essentially would have made it easier for the last two residents of another isolated island to leave. The angriest man in the Senate wore his trademark Incredible Hulk tie as he shouted down environmentalists who sought to preserve Alaska’s natural beauty, advocating drilling and clear-cutting old growth forest at every turn. He was also instrumental in helping to define the Internet as “not a big truck,” but rather, “a series of tubes.”

He Ain’t a Heavy, He’s My Brother

Prescott Bush, the underachiever of the Bush clan, has died at the age of 87. Eldest son of a Connecticut senator, older brother of a president and uncle to another (and counting), Prescott’s lone attempt at higher office was riding his brother’s coattails as VP when he sought the governor’s office in Connecticut in 1982. Despite an impressive early showing, Bush fell victim to the family trait of lacking “that vision thing,” and unlike the rest of the family, had the good manners to take the hint, dropping out of the race 5 weeks before the Republican primary.

Greener Pastures

America narrowly avoided a Constitutional crisis, as 2004 Green Party vice presidential nominee Peter Camejo has died of lymphoma at the age of 68. Luckily, Camejo and running mate Ralph Nader fell 270 electoral votes short of the White House. Camejo had also run for governor in 2002, 2003 and 2006. A true political opportunist, Camejo only joined the Green Party after a previous presidential run with the Socialist Workers Party in 1976.