Consider the opinions of Gingrich on the Belgian Congo; on race relations in the U.S.; about immigration from across the border; or how to treat underprivileged , hungry people. The inference is fairly clear. Gingrich has never been challenged by his all-white panelists on the CNN election platform. None of the presidential candidates who cluttered cable television last week were ready to respond to tough questions. The panel overall was as meek as mice.

After an airing of the past revelations uttered by Gingrich, it is impossible to imagine how many African-American or Latino voters will cast a ballot for him as president. Gingrich is an uncontrollable motor mouth. Yet, despite such flaws, many of his supporters still believe him fit to be a President or world leader..

As Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist of the New York Times said of Gingrich recently “He is a glib speaker, even when he has no idea of what he is talking about.” Krugman went on to say “My sense is that he’s very good at double think—that even when he knows what he’s said isn’t true while he’s saying it.

To any reporter who has covered politics from the highest to the lowest level — and I’ve covered many including the ill-fated Goldwater campaign in 1964 — it’s clear that Gingrich is tempted to say anything in public once he has access to a microphone or platform. Careless ideas simply roll off his tongue. So outrageous, oftentimes he can shock anyone within hearing distance. Gingrich has disdain for many Americans; not only poor ones, but blacks, gays, Arabs, or welfare recipients for starters. His analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is so absurd and over-simplified you would have to worry if he were elected president.

But Gingrich is not the sole champion of negative thinking in Republican ranks. The tactic may easily come back to haunt him on Election Day, if he gets that far. Having covered enough national politics, instinct tells me that a persistent negative campaign could sink the GOP. On the other hand, I would not be surprised by an Obama victory next November, providing he makes a slight indent in the unemployment and inflation figures. My hunch then is the President could win re-election next year and even by a substantial margin.

The problem for the GOP is that it is devoid of real solutions to cope with the economic doldrums gripping the nation. Moreover, it is trapped in a campaign with such implicit racist implications, it’s a miracle that so many of its political experts act as if it they didn’t exist.

From election day on, the Republicans have focused on getting Obama out of the White House, no matter the cost. But the President has been savvy enough politically to avoid turning it into a food fight. While every Republican office-holder or candidate seems determined since Day One to defeat Obama; no matter what the President says or stands for; regardless of what positive social policy he proposes and no matter how dedicated he is to reducing the number of American soldiers in Iraq, the Republicans say no.

They act as if they are deaf or blind to the latest polls that show 77% of the American people support the President. John McCain, Lindsay Graham and other prominent Republican legislators truck out every absurd excuse for keeping American troops on the ground in a war that literally ended months ago. You could ask how many of their own sons have ever served in Iraq or Afghanistan? But the answer would be insignificant. Having covered wars all over the world and seen body bags ad nauseum, the notion of reporting the number of American families that have sacrificed their sons or loved ones for vague objectives is painful for me.

Aggravating the nightly political discourse, the artificial debates staged by the cable networks are a waste of time. They are tailored to provoke outrageous arguments, so much so that anyone skilled in broadcasting should be demanding that more producers be hired to exercise control over the nonsense. Viewers are never told how difficult it is to win passage of any legislation in a divided Congress. Consequently, the American people have a negative view of government.

While Barack Obama exercises leadership abroad, the Republicans are pursuing worn out ideas that continue to harp on government spending, waste in Washington and the need for unregulated tax cuts.for the rich. That’s not what everyday shoppers at Walmart or Costco are talking about.

As Krugman said of Gingrich, “ he’s very good at double think — even when he knows that what he’s said isn’t true while he’s saying it.” It’s enough to encourage serious voters to move to Iceland.

After three hours of watching television Monday evening that began with another of your polite and reasonable appeals to the nation, it’s clear that the talk, the debates, the interviews about the financial crisis engulfing most Americans assuredly is doing nothing to excite your supporters and in fact is making most of us feel brain dead.

C’mon Mr. President, if the constant meetings with John Boehner and associates do not seem to be pulling your cord, then take a deep breath and cease being the conciliator.

Remember way back when you pursued the Democratic nomination for president, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed a group of Republican delegates by using a sneer to cite your experience as “a community organizer.” The crowed booed and hooted at the mention of your name as “a community organizer.” Now we who have covered a lot of politics in our lives knew exactly what Giuliani and his audience were driving at. They knew you had earned your spurs working in the troubled inner city of Chicago, alongside my old friend, Saul Alinsky. Giuliani’s remark was nothing less than a piece of racist trash. But who cared. The press wasn’t there to cover it.

Fast forward to the present time: Those guys on the other side of Capitol Hill, coupled with a pack of ambitious presidential candidates who want to replace you, along with those silly little women from Minnesota and Alaska who aspire to make their beds in the White House, have the audacity to believe they can defeat you. So what? Just because cable television and even National Public Radio gives them unwarranted air time does not legitimize their candidacy. What that’s all about is ratings, getting politicians to scream at each other.

The Republicans clearly will do anything they can to defeat your re-election bid. Just listen to one of their principal spokesmen, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Your defeat is his obsession. So stop kidding yourself or us. The senator from the blue grass country is leader of the pack. So you might as well challenge them to a bare knuckle fight. It is plain nonsense to hear them talk about speaking in behalf of the American people when you would suffer from eye strain trying to find any credible African Americans or working-class or unemployed Americans who ever appear on Capitol Hill as part of the GOP leadership.

All we ever see on television when the GOP bunch appears is an assortment of white, button-down cheerleaders who never have stood in line for an unemployment check in their lives. If only you and the ever so polite Washington journalists would ever get it through your heads, just throw their notebooks down in disgust and stop talking to each other, we might realize some progress on debt reduction and all the other stuff that preoccupies the so-called dialogue with the American people. That stuff means jobs and particularly jobs with some specificity.

To hear or watch the overall cast of Washington’s talking heads on Sunday Mornings or the daily cable shows must cause you either to scream or laugh at them. I’m waiting for an intelligent couple of producers to put a brake on these television stars and tell them to stop talking to each other and instead engage in discussion that makes absolute common sense to most Americans. I’ve talked to farmers, steelworkers, teachers and soldiers in my lifetime of reporting and believe me, they are a lot more intelligent than some of our anchormen and women give them credit.

What truly concerns Americans I talk to regularly is the need to put the country back to work. Jobs are what grate most unemployed Americans. They affect the worth of their homes, the amount of food they can put on the table, the lives they once were accustomed to living, the quality of the schools where they can send their children. It means being able to hold their heads high. Nobody, but nobody wants to stand in line at an unemployment office. Most of the unemployed worry about the medical bills for their families. How many of those glib members of Congress have ever had to cope with that problem?

Everyone talks about jobs, but neither the politicians nor civic leaders seem able to offer any specificity. I know that serious people may agree with my notion to construct a nationwide rail system powered by electricity that would go a long way toward dealing with our unemployment crisis. But these friends also concede that it is politically unfeasible at this time because of the troubled economy.

That’s why I harken back to the era of President Dwight Eisenhower who invaded the Defense budget to cover the cost of building the federal highway system in the 1950s.

Today, we could buy rail car designs from France, Germany and Japan, then turn them over to Detroit and every former assembly plant of the auto age. You could count on the United Auto Workers to entice thousands of unemployed and highly-skilled members to turn out new high speed rail cars. Cities can arouse a lumbering labor pool to modernize tracks and rail stations, build shopping plazas and parking lots that would generate enormous employment where it is needed.

Not only would Americans be put back to work en masse, they would be instrumental in spurring the construction of regional rapid rail systems on the West Coast and through heavily-populated areas of the East Coast. Obviously, all of this would take time but the American people want some vision originating from Washington and that requires your vision and passion, Mr. President. The availability of a federal rail system might well prompt tens of thousands of Americans to abandon their gas- guzzling cars, reduce traffic from our freeways, and our need for oil from the Middle East. It could spur a return to dependence on rail traffic and finally bring back some of the jobs industry has shipped overseas. In short, we might see some light at the end of the tunnel and put an end to the jobless economy.

That and protection of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are uppermost in the minds of many Americans. While I was waiting to see my cardiologist yesterday afternoon, I glanced around the waiting room, and what I saw was eight patients, average age 78 to 80, one in a wheel chair, waiting for one of the physicians who are partners in the practice of the man who saved my life more than once a decade ago. Dr. Nicholas Diaco and I frequently growl good humoredly and vehemently about politics and the cost of medical care. That doesn’t stop him from seeing me and a constant stream of aging Americans at his Santa Monica office. He’s an outspoken Republican and we are far away in our political tastes. The good doctor has been married a number of times, while my wife and I recently celebrated our golden wedding anniversary to mark a loving marriage.

Every day, I have learned from talking to many acquaintances seeking medical treatment or working out on the exercise gear at our nearby YMCA. What’s evident to me at least is a streak of common sense that reveals the level of impatience and frustration most of my friends share with the haggling in Washington. They’re bored with the ongoing debates over debt reduction and all the other mumbo jumbo that has been punctuating their ear lobes for several months. Many are retirees and are fed up with Republican threats to reduce the funding of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Some of these aging but loyal Americans know that death and taxes are inevitable. They accept from experience that the rich get richer and the middle class is aching. But they’ve heard that story before and are confident that the country somehow will pull out of its present tailspin. They’re convinced that even while some may have misgivings about you, Mr. President, but they say they intend to vote for you anyway. They wish you had the courage to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq knowing, of course, that the process may be underway. They have serious doubts about trying to graft democratic values onto the Arab world and they are fairly certain that you will be re-elected for a second term in the White House. But they wish you would bare your teeth and growl at your tormentors in the Republican Party.

Americans love and respect those who stand up and fight for what they believe in. They yearn for you to get angry, passionate and combative the way President Harry Truman did back in the days when he shocked the nation and took on “the do-nothing Congress” during a campaign swing by train across the country. The GOP, the press and the public had just about had written him off in his re-election campaign. Hah, were they shocked!

Americans want you to do battle with your opponents the way you did when you were seeking the presidential nomination three years ago. A dose of candor might cause the public opinion polls to jump like you might never before have imagined. Grrrr, Mr. President, Grrrr.

Of course, there always will be missing legislators to alibi that their absence from Washington is necessitated by the urgent need to visit their families or otherwise keep in touch with their contributors in an approaching election year. It used to be called milking the cow.

This year, the Republicans, who aren’t running for president, are pre-occupied with finding ways to rail against Medicare and other social programs. That prompted the president to sarcastically challenge the Republicans to stop protecting their fat cats’ tax privileges. He ticked off owners of corporate jets, who pocket an estimated three billion dollars over 10 years, and hedge fund managers whose oil and gas tax credits net $21 billion. More than a week ago when he unveiled plans for a defense budget build-down that’s been on many arms control experts’ minds for more than a year.

Professor Gordon Adams, a veteran scholar who has studied defense budgets and arms control for a generation at American University in Washington D.C., wrote recently in the Washington Post that the President’s proposal is to “reduce the projected U.S. national security budget by $400 billion over the next 12 years.”

As Adams explained it, the reduction “is being driven by concerns over deficits, debt and a declining interest in having the United States act as a global cop.” That’s what Americans want to hear in an era of hard times: halting the outflow of U.S. dollars before more of the U.S. treasury is sucked dry in part by the idealistic notion of subsidizing democracies in parts of the world that clearly demonstrate they do not have the stomach, the experience or the will for it.

Faced with devastating unemployment, saddled with bills to pay, bankruptcies or mortgages to cope with and medical bills or illnesses to confront, it does not take much brain power to realize that the country is being exhausted, demoralized, and its national spirit sapped by deficit spending.

Americans are desperate for change. They hunger for their imagination to be aroused and their can-do energy to find its way back into the country’s bloodstream. If anyone can do that it would seem to be Barack Obama in much the same way as he demonstrated it in Chicago’s Lincoln Park and at the Democratic National Convention Center three years ago when he inspired the nation and accepted the nomination for President.

But he needs to bark or campaign once again, to call the nation to rally to his side, and it can’t be done when so many Americans have been jobless for more than a year, when families are being forced from their homes and unfortunate children are facing the pressures of starvation and homelessness. Is this America? Of course not. At least it’s not the America I remember from my days of growing up in three different foster homes during the Great Depression.

There’s little doubt that the challenge is up to the President. He has it in his will and
capacity to energize the Democrats and independents by demanding that the Republicans abandon their gospel of tax cuts for the rich and hard times for everyone else. The GOP reveres them like the Holy Grail, which has to be put to rest once and for all. Otherwise, it will come down to class warfare which is nothing less than an obscenity.

Police helicopters flew overhead. Detectives swarmed onto the school grounds, Several kids were handcuffed for questioning. It was like a scene from NYPD Blue, only this one was not in Hollywood. It was set by a 17-year old boy, carrying a loaded 9mm Baretta handgun in his backpack. From what eyewitnesses said, he had placed his backpack down on a desk and a gun inside accidentally went off. Two 15-year olds: a boy and a girl were wounded. The girl was rushed to a nearby hospital where she underwent lengthy surgery, suffering from a skull fracture and brain trauma. The boy had been grazed in the neck by the same bullet. They were lucky. Unlike the nine-year-old girl in Arizona, they will survive. The names of the wounded students, as well as the boy with the gun, were momentarily withheld. Everyone involved claimed the shooting was an accident.

It occurred in mid-morning that several students described as a climate of fear. Everyone, it seems, was afraid of the persistent gang violence that has been present on the school grounds for some time. But why then did school authorities not deal with the problem forcefully and immediately? If the boy with the gun apparently was both afraid and angry, why didn’t his parents detect his fear and, moreover, how did the boy obtain the gun and from whom? Unanswered questions for sure.

The following day a school security guard was shot point blank in the chest near a campus across town – in the San Fernando Valley. The bullet knocked the guard down and though a protective vest prevented the bullet from entering his body, the gunman got away. Nine schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District — the largest district in the country — were on lockdown for much of the day until the suspect was captured.

After reading accounts of these incidents, I endured the chills and a flashback of memory on the day after one commemorating the birthday of a man of peace; an apostle of non-violence who himself was destined to die some 50 years later. My thoughts went back to 1965 when I walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King as a reporter on the March from Selma, Alabama.

What few people knew, including we reporters, was that a funeral hearse trailed behind the marchers, so fearful, his aides believed, that Dr. King could be the target of a would-be assassin. Understanding that I had just returned from an assignment in Vietnam for CBS News, he questioned me intensely about the effect of the war on individual soldiers, especially black GIs. His angst came full bore in 1967 when I was back in Vietnam and King chose to go public about his opposition to the war in a remarkable sermon he delivered at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Many of his close advisors urged him to withhold criticism of the war fearing it would divert attention from the civil rights campaign. Worse yet, the sermon, delivered on April 4, 1967 indeed did rupture his relationship with President Johnson and closed King’s access to the White House. Ironically, it was.exactly a year to the day before James Earl Ray assassinated him in Memphis with a weapon he purchased in a gun shop.

While more than a week has passed since the slaughter in Tucson, it struck me that on the anniversary of King’s birthday that remembers both his birth and death, Americans have tolerated for generations the mistaken belief that the Constitution guaranteed them the right to pack a gun. That was not so originally. At the time of its writing, the Second Amendment stipulated that “in the absence of a well-regulated militia” the people had the right to bear arms when the country was virtually defenseless. Today, our law enforcement apparatus in both the civilian and military aspects of our society. is enormous and well-defended. Most of the crimes that occur in the United States are committed by individuals who have a gun illegally.

The gun may be a protector in time of an emergency, but historically because of its dramatic and illegal use, it has become a curse on American society. It needs to be regulated the way our cars and drivers’ licences are–to obtain one requires several tests. In order to purchase many medications, prescriptions first must be written by a licensed physician. But thanks to a steady and heavily financed campaign by the National Rifle Association, strict legislation is impossible. The use of the gun is accepted almost philosophically by presidents and politicians on Capitol Hill as well as office holders in state, county and city offices. Fear causes their timidity; fear that they will be the target of some gun nut or fear that it will cost them re-election when voters go to the polls. .

Many Americans flock to our nation’s gun shows to salivate over the latest weapons they can take home “to protect” themselves. They accept the fraudulent notion that the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to carry a gun. Mind you, we are no longer talking about ordinary pistols, but killer guns like the Glock 19 that spew out dozens of bullets that on impact cause the kind of bodily damage that no television station, cable network or news will dare to show its viewers.

The political power structure and the media have danced all around the issues that have made it possible for Jared Loughner to kill and nearly end the lives of a crossection of innocents who had come to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Gffords.

Unfortunately, ours is a country besieged by violence but engrossed as well by artificial violence. The central figures appearing in motion pictures and televised movies feature gun-wielding heroes and villains in which the winners take all. Movie trailers are laced with bang-bang to lure audiences into the following week’s screenings. Electronic games with the emphasis on violence are the most popular form of entertainment for our children and young adults.

In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, every expert on gun violence has been contacted by journalists from newspapers, television and radio stations, or cable talk show hosts to dissect Loughner’s motivation.

Perhaps we have been so desensitized by violence that the war in Afghanistan has lost its meaning, despite the fact that American lives are at stake every day. The notion has been remote or distant to the majority of Americans. Like the wars– first in Vietnam and then Iraq– both of which were undeclared, the news coverage of day to day violence on the battlefield has been carefully sanitized on the 6:30 news which rarely shows the gore of war.

During the Vietnam war, I remember a kind of quiet self-censorship that was applied by editors at CBS News, and I’m sure the other national news networks. The rule of thumb was “use the wide shot, skip the tight shot.”

More recently Americans have gotten a detached view of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In our gun culture, the notion persists that the owners would know how to use a gun if indeed they had one.. A whole lot of “cowboys” reinforce the myth.. Under normal circumstances, widespread statistics indicate that in the eventuality of a robbery, a holdup of homes or businesses or an otherwise serious threat to their well-being, most gun owners would not have easy access to a weapon in their possession or easy access to one.

From personal experience, I would venture a guess that an overwhelming majority of Americans, from gun owners to ordinary homeowners or Arizona cowboys are clueless about the impact of the weapons in their hands or pockets.

Guns, guns and more guns is the crazy legacy for those who have fallen in Tucson.

I remember a particularly ghastly incident in Vietnam when U.S. Marines suffered heavy casualties because a battalion confronted by well-armed North Vietnamese had not been given instructions in how to clean the dust covers of their newly-arrived M-16 rifles. Dozens of Marines were killed because dust jammed their weapons.

The old myths are the legacy of those who have fallen in Tucson.

Eventually, when two armed teenagers were killed in a high school gang fight in the San Fernando Valley, I chastised their parents in a broadcast I did in Los Angeles, citing the story of my experience in Vietnam. I also made a strong plea for gun control. The reaction was predictable. Dozens of angry letters came in from radio listeners. Two of them actually called me a fool. Others said I was just naïve, and a few threatened my life.

A decade or more later, the idea of gun control is still a hot button issue; out of reach and beyond the will and courage of most politicians in the U.S. Congress or most state legislatures to face down one of the strongest and most endowed lobbies in history, the National Rifle Association.

The tragic events that unfolded last Saturday could alter the national discourse. The reporting of the past 72 hours or more has reminded us of the other tragedies that have confronted us in our public and private lives since the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy as well as the innocent victims of Columbine and Virginia Tech. And the list grows. Now it is up to the most articulate figure in the land to put the national pain into some perspective; that man, of course, being the president of the United States.

From the horrific story in Arizona several positive symbols have emerged: first, the heroism of several unarmed people who had the courage to tackle and disarm the killer, Jared L. Loughner. Secondly, the team of surgeons who operated feverishly to save the life of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and finally, American newspapers that have published the story in enormous and riveting detail. The daily press ain’t dead yet.

Certainly, the reporting by Marc Lacey of the New York Times, and journalists of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, as well as other daily newspapers have given people across the country as complete a picture of the tragedy as anyone could possibly expect. The public may have forgotten that the talking heads of television and radio could not thrive without the newspapers that land on their laps every morning. The printed word, be it on paper or online or any other form of technological wizardry has helped to inform any American with the patience to read and understand the terrible story that has grabbed the nation’s conscience by the throat.

The confusing hypocrisy that always seems to have divided Americans is the issue of
how we control the proliferation and use of guns. It is what almost every decent law enforcement officer in the land wants. I hesitate to use the commonly used phrase of gun control because that frightens many office seekers like lead poisoning. Nontheless,the muffled debate until now is between those who want to end gun violence and are appalled by the tragedy in Tucson and those who equally are shocked , but fervently stick to their constitutional right to own a gun; even among those who do not know how to use one. The debate always is the aftermath of a senseless massacre that has shocked the nation once again.

Unfortunately, the supporters of gun control automatically want to silence the loudmouths on talk radio and television or dispense with Sarah Palin In spirit, I understand them, but as a First Amendment fanatic, I believe Beck, O’Reilly and Limbaugh have the right to voice their reckless or cynical points of view, however absurd they may be. Americans are entitled to hear and evaluate them, but NOT act on them as we might assume Jared Loughner did in attempting to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords. We do not know at this point what it was that affected the unstable gunman, but odds are that we will not be pleased by what we hear once Loughner agrees to testify in court.

The unanswered question is who is giving the purveyors of their exaggerations and inflammatory language the means to pollute the air waves? After all, as consumers we deserve truth in packaging and should know the names of the principal owners of our television and radio networks. Of course, most Americans are wise enough to know already. Nonethless, it would be useful to be reminded of just who is making it possible to present the warped view of American politics 24/7. We know it ain’t a Fox. But it is in one sense, the well-heeled multi-billionaire who may be too embarrassed to admit he is the man who makes it possible to peddle the poison on the Murdoch Television Network.