Predictions for a wild 2012 - what the news could hold month by month

Newt Gingrich (EWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

It's that time of year again.  We can look back on another miserable year and, against all evidence to the contrary, hope for better things.  Herewith, some predictions for the year to come.

JANUARY: Since no one seemed to care when New York City Fire Department big wigs referred to Irishmen as “drunks,” budget crunchers devise a novel way to save money during tough fiscal times -- get rid of the Irish!

You might recall, in the summer, a former FDNY assistant commissioner testified that one FDNY honcho said, “You’re dealing with a lot of Irishmen who are drunks and they get into bar fights and they get arrested and they get arrested again. They fight, they sock their girlfriends…they get arrested because they fought with the police when they got arrested.”

With times so tight in New York City, officials in the police, sanitation and corrections departments quietly begin pointing out that the Irish are not only “drunks,” but also bad dancers who eat weird food.

“And what’s up with that ‘Irish goodbye?’” one anonymous source will be quoted as saying.
When asked if this is a slightly racist way to save money, another source will note: “Maybe.  But did you ever see those old cartoons that made the Irish look like apes?  They want to put that guy in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. So, I think we’re safe.”

FEBRUARY: On Valentine’s Day, Sinead O’Connor announces that her fourth marriage is coming to an end because she is going to get married to someone else.  She’s not sure who just yet.

MARCH: Recalling the surprising warmth of the reception given to Queen Elizabeth during her 2011 trip to Ireland, Pope Benedict heads to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day.  He is baffled when greeted by signs reading “God Save the Queen.” He is no longer baffled when additional signs demand accountability for ongoing sex abuse cases.

“You guys weren’t so angry at the Germans back during World War II,” the Pope mutters before returning to the Vatican.

APRIL:  Recalling the warmth of the reception given to Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich visits Ireland.

He touts his conversion to Catholicism (even though he has been married three times), but trouble beckons when the former Baptist visits Northern Ireland.

At first Gingrich claims he is there to visit his family’s ancestral homeland, in Insihowen, Co. Donegal.
But Gingrich falls under the spell of local preachers and converts again to Presbyterianism. Gingrich also separates from his third wife.

MAY: All of the other Republican candidates for president head to Ireland with their campaign staffs and the massive infusion of tourist money lifts the nation out of its economic doldrums.

JUNE: Sinead O’Connor announces that she will marry Newt Gingrich.

JULY: Gingrich arrested during violent Loyalist July 12 march.  “This is awesome,” Gingrich says.  “In the U.S., all we have are those lame Occupy Wall Street guys.”

AUGUST: Stephen King had another blockbuster hit with his doorstopper novel 11/22/63.  The book explored what would happen if a character went back in time and tried to prevent the assassination of the first Irish Catholic president.

In his next book, entitled 8/22/22, King will go even deeper into the Irish genre.  On the 90th anniversary of the mysterious assassination of Irish freedom fighter Michael Collins, King sends a character back in time to find out exactly who killed Collins.

Collins infamously signed the treaty which freed the Republic of Ireland but left Northern Ireland in the hands of the British.  This topic turns out to be too gruesome even for Stephen King.

Once the assassination is thwarted, King’s characters come to life and look to assassinate the author himself.  Let’s just say the bullet wins out over the ballot.

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER: Somehow, Gingrich hangs on to win the Republican nomination and he and Obama agree to a series of debates -- but only if they are held in Ireland.  Once there, the duo decide they don’t want to return to the U.S.

“The Irish people are a lot nicer,” Obama says.

Gingrich adds: “A lot of people wanted a diaspora president.  No one said it had to be the president of Ireland.”

Happy New Year!

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Tear down statute of limitations on cases of sexual abuse of children

Markey aims to extend limitations on reporting sex abuse cases

Margaret Markey is a New York State Assemblywoman from Queens who represents heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods such as Woodside, Maspeth and Sunnyside.

Elected in 1998, Markey, a past president of the New York State American Irish Legislators Society, has stepped into the fray over the recent spate of sex abuse horror stories and offered up a solution that seems eminently sensible.

Markey has introduced a bill that would change the current statute of limitations when it comes to criminal and civil cases.  Currently, when the victim turns 18, they have five years to come forth. 
Markey’s bill would not start the clock until the victims turn 23.

“I’m going to do what I can to get Governor Cuomo and the Senate on board,” Markey was quoted in the Daily News as saying. “I think we have a fair chance with the governor.”

It’s not hard to understand why Markey would call for the passage of this bill now.  We have read about a terrible litany of sex abuse crimes against kids in recent weeks. 

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There have been allegations coming out at a dizzying pace -- from Penn State University, from Syracuse University and from Poly Prep High school in Brooklyn, just to name a few.

And, of course, it is impossible to discuss a story such as this without acknowledging the broader history of abuse in the Catholic Church, in the U.S., Ireland and elsewhere.

And therein lies some of the trouble.

The Catholic Church has lobbied to prevent the passage of Markey’s bill.  She made note of this fact when commenting about it earlier this week.

“This bill is not about the Catholic Church,” said Markey. “It is about pedophiles. But some of my colleagues are intimidated by the Catholic Church.”

And lest anyone suggest Markey is merely jumping on a hot issue to get some headlines, she has been fighting for a bill such as this for most of the past decade.

As the Daily News noted, “Markey first introduced the bill seven years ago and it cleared the Assembly several times but has faced stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled Senate and the Catholic Church.”

Irish Americans such as David Clohessy, executive director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, have long supported legislation extending the statute of limitations in such cases.

Clohessy and others had hoped the ongoing horror of abuse revelations might persuade lawmakers in New York, as well as Arizona and Wisconsin, to pass Markey’s law.

This past summer, however, after intense lobbying efforts by the New York State Catholic Conference, a similar bill was defeated in the New York State Senate.

“You cannot ask institutions to take responsibility for the failures of a few individuals whose actions took place 40 and 50 years ago,” said Dennis Poust, the communications director of the New York State Catholic Conference.

There is no point in making this a story about the evil, secretive Catholic Church. 

First of all, the Catholic Church is not the only religious organization opposed to these reforms. 

Numerous Jewish groups also see the law as a way to decimate their finances, images or both.  (And further proving this is not merely a Catholic problem, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes is currently prosecuting “an astounding 85 accused Orthodox child molesters,” according to the New York Post.)

More broadly, it should go without saying that sex abuse cases that originated years, even decades earlier, must be treated with a certain amount of sensitivity.  There is research that suggests childhood memories about such traumatic events can be unreliable. 

On the other hand, it is also clear that victims often bury their pain away in deep, dark places.  There are a thousand and one reason to do this, one of them being that a 12-year-old has positively no idea what to do with such pain. 

Adulthood finally brings with it a sense that something can be done about such a horrendous crime.
That a statute of limitations might possibly protect a criminal who, it’s quite clear, has a pattern of abusive behavior, is yet another insult to the victims who have suffered so long.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Give Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich credit on immigration views

Newt Gringrich

Imagine you are political advisor to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. 

For months, your campaign has floundered.  Your guy was once one of the most powerful men in Washington, the speaker of the House and a man famous for his intellectual power. 

But then he fell from power and more or less vanished from the Washington scene.  So much so that when Gingrich announced he was running for president, one was tempted to say, “1996 called, they want Newt Gingrich back.”

But the only thing weaker than Gingrich seemed to be, well, every other GOP candidate. 

Herman Cain has his woman problems and Michele Bachmann’s kook factor is just a bit too high and, finally, Mitt Romney has, well, a Mitt Romney problem.  In that, he can’t convince anyone that he is anybody other than Mitt Romney and, thus, simply a lackluster political candidate.

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And lo and behold, in recent weeks, Gingrich has surged.  And so, you can imagine how his political advisors must have felt when Gingrich, finally in the lead, went ahead and made some crazy comments 

about immigration last week.

"If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully, and kick you out."

Huh?  What was Gingrich, Mr. Conservative, actually saying?  Was he suggesting that not all immigrants are filthy freeloaders?

He continued, "I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter-century. And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, ‘Let's be humane.’"

Humane?

That’s not a word that has been associated with Republican immigration policy since, well, since Rick Perry suggested it was heartless for candidates to bash immigrants.

Then again, we see how well Rick Perry’s candidacy is going these days.  And that’s why you must feel bad for Gingrich’s advisors.  But it’s also why Gingrich deserves credit for reframing the Republican debate over this contentious issue.

Needless to say, Gingrich’s opponents pounced on him, bashing his ideas as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

They did this, in large part, because they believe that Republican primary voters in general – and Tea 

Party backers in particular – are hungry for a hard-liner when it comes to immigration.

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And they may be right.  After all, Perry’s thinking-outside-the-box did not exactly help him. 

Furthermore, as John Heilemann noted in this week’s New York magazine, there is disturbing evidence that elements in the Republican Party have anti-immigrant tendencies on their GOP wish list.

“In a landmark book-length study being published this month, the Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol… --  on the basis of copious, careful, and not unsympathetic field reporting” found that an “animus against ‘freeloaders’…unifies the tea-partiers across the nation, with illegal immigrants preeminent in that category.”

That a group of people accused of working so hard that they steal American jobs can also be seen as 

freeloaders is another question for another time. 

As for Gingrich, perhaps he is simply hoping to make it through the Republican primaries and win some Hispanic votes in the November 2012. 

If so, maybe he has looked at past immigration voting patterns.  The Irish, for example, voted 

Democratic for over 100 years not only because local ward bosses, though often corrupt, were also responsive to their needs. 

It did not hurt that Republicans harbored some strong anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant candidates.  Then again, so did certain elements of the Democratic party in the south and Mid-West. 

And even then the Republicans could not sway significant numbers of white ethnic Catholics until the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s much talk among conservatives about the 11 million illegal immigrants in America.  They focus on the term “illegal” in that sentence. 

Perhaps Gingrich has realized that someone should focus on “11 million” and try and win some of those or their children’s’ votes.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or Facebook.com/tomdeignan)
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The good old days? - Anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigots and the KKK

Thomas Nast cartoon

It is always interesting, at this time of year, to remind people that cartoonist Thomas Nast – beloved
for more or less inventing our cherished image of Santa Claus – was also a wildly anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigot.

For proof, see any of his cartoons from the late 19th Century in which the Irish look like apes and Catholics are depicted as crocodiles or other scheming, rapacious beasts.

Nast has been in the news of late because an entity called the New Jersey Hall of Fame has suggested that he perhaps be enshrined in their institution.

Such a situation can make you think about many things, but one thing that comes to my mind is that what we think of as “the good old days” were pretty damned bad.
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Oh, without a doubt, we have our problems today.  This is reflected in polls which show that Americans feel about as bad as you can about everything from the economy to Congress.

Along with that, inevitably, comes a feeling that things were once good but we lost something along the way.

Hardly.

Look at politics for a moment.  You bet we have our problems now.  You can say we have a real problem with these boneheaded Tea Party types or these freeloading Occupy Wall Street types.

But that is baby stuff compared to the rough stuff that emerged from the political scene, say, in the 1920s.

In fact, not one but two new books have recently been published about the power and influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th Century.  Talk about your fun holiday reading!

The titles are One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by Thomas R. Pegram and Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 by Kelly J. Baker.

In his review of the two books in The New York Times this past Sunday, National Book Award-winner and Irish American historian Kevin Boyle blunders a bit by more or less comparing the Tea Party to the 1920s-era KKK.

“Imagine,” Boyle wrote, “a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.”

He’s speaking, of course, of the Klan, but leading readers to think of the Tea Party.

Even if you agree with Boyle’s characterization of the Tea Party, to see them as inheritors of the Klan’s  tradition says more about the Tea Party’s current critics than it does about the group itself.

If anything, even if you believe the Tea Party is the new Klan, this shows you how much better off we are today.  After all, there’s no denying certain, maybe even many, Tea Party members have dabbled in race-baiting, class warfare and religious zealotry.

But those things are not central to the philosophy of the Tea Party, as they proudly were to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The Irish, Italians, Jews, the Vatican.  The Klan vociferously fought against all of these things and more.

As Ken Burns’ recent documentary on Prohibition showed, the Klan was making a final stand for a rural, Protestant America that saw cities as mongrelized bastions of sin.

And when Roman Catholic Al Smith was roundly beaten in the 1928 presidential election, it might have seemed the Klan was going to win.

Perhaps most interestingly, Republicans sat out this fight.  This was an intra-Democratic clash, with the ethnic Tammany Hall wing of the Dems doing battle with the racist, anti-immigrant rural wing of the party.

Yes, the KKK had members on the Supreme Court and in Congress and in state houses across the country. But the Klan was eventually ushered off the national stage.

Their paranoid impulses, of course, stuck around.  We see vestiges of it today all across the political spectrum.

Vestiges are one thing.  Burning crosses are another.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)