SO HOW COME A REPUBLICAN stole the thunder from the Democratic candidates in the Presidential Debate last night at Drexel University? If you didn't watch the debate on MSNBC broadcast live from West Philadelphia, you missed one of the beautiful moments of American politics -- like when a UFO-spying midget from Ohio makes more sense than his taller and wealthier competitors for job of president.

While John Edwards and Barack Obama did their best to barbecue Hillary Clinton on live TV, the one shrimp at the barbie, Dennis Kucinich, laid down a a napalm airstrike that glowed all the way to the White House. Why? -- Kucinich asked in outraged tones equal the the importance of what he said -- do we have a nut like George Bush still in office?

Earlier the former boy-mayor of Cleveland and the current longshot for the Democratic nomination had elicited the most authentic barely-stifled applause from the polite Drexel University audience by pointing out, accurately, that George Bush and his henchmen have suspended the Constitution, waged an unjust and illegal war, violated their oathes of office and should be impeached.

Yes, he said it. And to hear it from a candidate on the same stage as the Democratic frontrunner, whose husband was impeached for lying about a BJ rather than a foreign war, was a thrilling moment. Even the most articulate Democratic candidates seem to be tiptoeing past the cemetery of American lives, fortune and honor, too afraid to state the obvious.

But then Kucinich took it up a notch. He basically said the President is crazy. As proof he offered Bush's bewildering decision to publicly and repeatedly accuse Iran of fomenting "World War III." The president of the most powerful nation on earth should not be using the WWIII-word. It tends to scare the bejabbers out of the rest of the world. A world that already has seen this president use the non-existent WMD-word to justify an invasion of an irritating but soverign nation half a planet away.

Kucinich said what we all know. He said, "We all know that the invasion of Iraq was about oil." And now a barrel of oil costs twice as much as it did before Bush's transparent attempt to secure Middle East oil reserves by overthrowing the most unpopular dictator in the Musilim world. And what has Bush learned from his failure? He thinks he can get away with it again. New country, same approach. Except now he's amped up accusations of "weapons of mass destruction" into "World War III"\

No, Bush isn't nuts. We are for pretending he's sane.

But despite what Kucinich said so effectively, the long-shot candidate for president who proabably gained the most from the Democratic throwdown in Philadelphia was a Republican. Supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, an anti-war anti-tax Republican, camped out behind the outdoor set of Chris Matthews for the entire hour of his post-debate analysis show on MSNBC. "Ron Paul Revolution" signs were the most prominent and unavoidable backdrop among a cadre of candidate poster bearers.

Then, as if it was scheduled, anyone turning to Jay Leno immediately after the post-debate show ended, saw candidate Ron Paul killing the Tonight Show audience with his wry humor and straight talk.

Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are the monkey wrench candidates in this presidential election. They seem to make more sense and speak more clearly than any of the candidates who actually have a chance-in-hell of becoming our next president. Like Ross Perot, we're more in love with their blunt and startling honesty than their possible success.

It's a shame too. The way things are weighed these days, by the media, by the political parties, by the money, by the irresistible flow of meaningless information that demands an answer as to who will win an election more than a year away. And we all buy into it. We are as impatient for resolution as the impatient forces we mock or pretend to ignore.

If you didn't watch the Democratic Presidential debate last night you may have missed the last chance to take a good look at all the candidates -- one of whom you may actually like for reasons that suprise you - before, one by one, each slip into the obscurity that comes with failing to play the game dishonestly enough to win.

Continue reading "But the big winner at the Philadelphia debate. . ." »

Posted by clarkdeleon at 05:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

TO SHOW YOU HOW MUCH everyone in Scranton got behind The Office Convention this past weekend, consider this eye catching sign outside a local business establishment on Linden Street a couple of blocks from the epicenter of fun and star worship at the University of Scranton where thousands of fans of the hit NBC comedy show, The Office, gathered to greet the show's cast members.

Taking a page from the sit-com's mockery of mind-nimbing corporate communication, local Scranton undertaker Frank Regan mounted a poster-sized yellow memo outside his place business. It reads:

MEMO

To: Ryan Howard, Corporate
Fr: Michael Scott, Scranton and the Frank M. Regan Funeral Home
Re: Convention, Oct. 25-26, 2007

PAPER IS NOT DEAD
WE SHOULD KNOW.

Continue reading "Ain't no memo like a scranton memo" »

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IF YOU LOVE PENNSYLVANIA -- and let's face it, no matter how much we complain, no other state feels like home -- you've got to love what happened in Scranton over the weekend. Despite two days of almost constant rain on Friday and Saturday the capital city of NEPA (Northeastern Pennsylvania) won the hearts and minds of Hollywood during the three-day Office-Con, a gathering of cast, writers, producers and thousands of fans of the NBC hit comedy The Office.

I took the two-hour ride up the Northeast Extension Saturday morning in funereal rainfall that had me feeling sorry for Scranton before I had even arrived. Here was this scrappy luckless town's moment in the sun and the gloomy skies were sucking the very color from the autumn leaves, which have actually turned dramatically 100 miles north. Who knew that a rainy day in Scranton could be fabulous?

And when the skies cleared into brilliant sunshine around 4 p.m., it was like the bouyant karma of the gathering had won the battle with nature. From the hilltop campus of the University of Scranton, where the The Office Convention was headquartered, downtown Scranton seemed to gleam in a halo of golds and russets from the tree-crowded hillsides.

It looked every bit as beautiful as The Office executive producer Greg Daniels had described it minutes earlier in a crowded press conference where he became perhaps the first person , with a straight face anyway, to compare hardscrabble Scranton with the mythical Emerald City. "As we drove into Scranton for the first time it was like arriving in Oz after reading about it all those years," Daniels said. "The surrounding area is so much more beautiful than the dusty brown lots in Van Nuys (California) where we create our show."

The Office has made famous an old saying that a Scranton cop told me dates back to the days of vaudeville, "There ain't no party like a Scranton party, cause a Scranton party never ends." And The Office cast partied like it was still 1999. They sang karioke late at night, they jammed on stage with the local band, the Scrantones, Philly-born Kate Flannery (who plays Meredith) joined the band to sing along to the Pennsylvania Polka, and Ed Helms (who plays Andy) summed up the cast's experience, "It's like we're the Beatles in Scranton."

And in a way, this quirky TV comedy series is doing for Scranton what the Beatles did for Liverpool, what Rocky did for Philadelphia. It's making a home town suddenly feel special in the eyes of the world for being what it's always been. Itself.

Continue reading "Scranton Goes Hollywood" »

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DEER HUNTING SEASON in Pennsylvania is still a month away, but someone has announced an open season on the "Caution Deer" signs along Northeast Extention of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Aside from the usual bullet holes that such roadside signs inevitably attract, some prankster or pranksters unknown have adorned the leaping buck on the diamond shaped signs with a bright red applique nose. This particular sign is located on the side of northbound lanes of the turnpike about a mile south of the Hickory Run service plaza, although it appears that every deer sign between the Lehigh Tunnel and Scranton has been given the Rudolph treatment.

Continue reading "Taking aim at Rudolph" »

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THAT'S MY NEICE Whitney Seymour who is spending her junior year in college studying Spanish in Chile. Whitney spotted this Eagles jersey while shopping in a thrift store on Friere Street in the regional capital city of Concepcion, and she sent me this photo as a shout out to her Tio Clark in Philadelphia.

Continue reading "T.O. Gets a Chile Reception" »

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I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING this morning: How 'bout them Pumas? Sure, sure there are those who want to talk about the Springboks, who hammered the Eagles 64-15 last month during their six-week march to the Rugby World Cup championship which ended Saturday when South Africa defeated defending world champion England 15-6 in the final.

Continue reading "Not this year rose boy" »

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THAT'S MOLLY OUR BABY giving her senior class ring a ceremonial twist for good luck after the annual Ring Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul where the graduating class of Little Flower High School received their Class of 2008 school rings. Like almost everything at Little Flower the ceremony was filled with school traditions passed down from alumni to seniors to juniors to sophomores to incoming freshman in a seamless embrace that has spanned six decades.

Molly was a public for the first ten years of her formal education from pre-school to eighth grade at C.W. Henry Elementary School in Mt. Airy. From vividly remembered personal experience in Philadelphia Archdiocesan grade school, I never thought there would be a day when I would gladly send one of our children to Catholic school, let alone an all-girl Catholic school in an unsavory neigborhood in North Philadelphia across Lycoming Street from Hunting Park. But Little Flower, named for St. Theresa, proved to be a special school during our first visit with Molly during an open house four years ago.

It seems like yesterday. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was yesterday. But that Class of 2008 patch that Molly has been wearing for more than three years proves that her high school days will be over in June and then our little flower will be off to college, and our nest will be truly empty for the first time in 36 years.

I'd shed a tear but I'm too busy clicking my heels.

I kid my little 17-year-old daughter who, no matter what the occasion, chooses to address me with an exasperated teenage double syllable, "Daa-duh." She's the light of my life, of course, but she has that uncomon ability of teenage girls to make their fathers' presence feel as welcome as acne on prom night. I'm not saying that Molly would try to get another date to the annual Father-Daughter Dance in December, but she has hinted that tickets are going to be hard to come by.

I know she loves me as much as I love her, but teenage girls tend to treat their male parental units with the same enthusiasm as nine year old boys treat an ant colony. I'm used to it by now and it really doesn't hurt except when I breathe.

But I look at my little girl, the lovely duckling now a stunning swan, and I'm so happy and proud. She's smart and poised and funny and, for the most part, nice. She is the youngest of our children and the best thing to have happened to her mother and father and brother and sister. We thought our family was complete, and then along came Molly. And once again we discovered how much love a baby brings into this world like a personal gift from heaven.

Call me anything you want, sweetheart. I'll always answer.

Continue reading "And a twist for good luck before goodbye" »

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WHEN I LOOKED at the front page photo of that fat, sad, funk of a 14-year-old boy from Plymouth Whitemarsh High School in handcuffs and manacles, I thought of when I was the same age and of every bully I wanted to murder. Spectacularly. Apocalyptically. Exploding pumpkin head splatter. Awful to imagine.

When I laid me down to sleep, such were my dreams of revenge. And I was what you would call a normal kid. If you could have read my mind, you would have arrested me. If you could have read my heart, you would have applauded.

Of course, I never spoke of these thoughts out loud until just now. Had I spoken of them then, and had I enlisted a friend in my dreadful fantasy, and if my mother had bought me a semi-automatic rifle, and if my father had served five years in prison for manslaughter, and if I had been really, really fat instead of merely pudgy. . . well, I'd be a different person.

But what I recognize in this alarming story from the safe harbor of a good school in a comfortable suburb is the homicidal desire to do something dramatic against those who made me feel so powerless. Who made me feel ashamed to be me.

The front page image of a chained and shackled Dillon Cossey, the alleged Columbine wannabe, was beyond pathetic. He looked as menacing as Bobby Hill, the doughy pre-teen son of a clueless cartoon father who sells propane and propane accessories. And yet this kid faces charges of mass murder in his mind.

I'm glad he's caught. I'm glad he's been found out. I'm grateful to the young man who turned him in. And yet I can't help but feel sorry for him, this poor fat sad funk of a boy who is now labled a monster for the rest of his life. And I can't help but feel a familiar rage toward those invisible demons, those boogiemen, those horrible mean children who hurt this child so much he wanted to kill them all.

One of the biggest regrets in my life is that I may have been a bully and didn't know it. I must have been, somehow, a bully. I was getting even with the wrong people. And I want to apologize. I hope that matters. Even bullies grow up.

Continue reading "All the lonely people. And a bully for every one" »

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REGULAR READERS OF THE DOUBLE D may recall the photo posted Sept. 28 of the spectacular blaze of yellow autumn leaves on a teee I saw in Rte. 202 not far from Lansdale. I wrote that because of the lack of rain in September, experts say this fall will be the most colorful autumn in decades. I showed you the photo of that tree to illustrate what we can expect.

Last Thursday I took a photo of the same tree (above). You'll notice that the spectacular tree is all but bare. It happened in a matter of days. You'll also notice that the surrounding trees are still more green than russet. I guess the message is, ya never know. So keep your eyes open. Everything is going to pop soon. And if this tree is any example, it's not going to be around long. Enjoy.

Continue reading "I guess you had to be there" »

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THERE WERE NO TEARS or groans in the DeLeon house when the Phillies dream died early yesterday morning. Dad was the only one still awake a little after 1 a.m. when in the ninth inning Harry Kalas almost sighed, "The Phillies are now down to their last strike."

Continue reading "Feeling good while feeling really really bad" »

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TELL THAT LITTLE GIRL that the Phillies have no chance. Go ahead, I dare you. When I saw her last Saturday outside Citizens Bank Park, I had high hopes just like she did that the Phillies would win that day. They didn't. But they did the next day to clinch the division. And now we face another must-win game in Colrado Saturday night. And, well sir, to summon the words of my departed pal Tug McGraw, "Ya gotta believe!"

Continue reading "Oops there goes another Rockie Kerplop!" »

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NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PHILLIES FANS to come to the aid of their city and their team. It pretty much comes down to this. Either you're with us, or you're a stinking Yankees fan. Of course, we're playing the Colorado Rockies. But our eyes are on the Yanks.

Why? If I have to tell you, it ruins the story. You either know, or you don't. But trust me. We want the Yankees in the World Series. The same way we wanted Dallas in the 1980 NFC Conference Championship game.

This little victory celebration took place outside of Dirty Frank's Bar at 13th and Pine on the day the Phillies clinched the National League East flag on Sept. 30, 2007. May the best be yet to come.

Continue reading "are you ready for some baseball?!!!" »

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RETURN WITH ME NOW, my children, to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the Phillies visited the post season almost as dependably as the Eagles have these past few seasons. Between 1976 and 1983 baseball playoffs fell upon Philadephia like pennies from heaven and Phillies fans ran around with buckets on their heads storing up the coins for the long winters ahead.

We won it all in 1980 -- which was the year I realized that I could die a happy man. Providence had granted me something I was beginning to doubt I would ever live to see. A Phillies world championship. It was a gorilla on the back of every Philadelphia sports fan. And in a single pitch by Tug McGraw that gorilla became an organ grinder's monkey in a funny little hat. The wait, the weight, was gone. Like magic.

Magic. What else would you call this season? It started like Valley Forge, a shivering 4-11 April. And we who have suffered through so many Bataan Death March seasons nodded at each other. There was no need for words. Sucks, sucks. We have worn a groove in that road. We recognized it for the rut it was.

And yet in the heart of every Phillies fan there lives that Tinkerbell of hope that is every bit as powerful as that dead gorilla ever was. Phillies fans have more reason to be lifelong cynics than fans of any other major league baseball team. And yet we resist the obvious heart-preserving answer. To stop caring. We can't do it. It is not in our nature.

I was a kid in 1964. It may seem like ancient history but ask your father or mother. From seven to 70 there wasn't an unbroken heart in Philadelphia. The Phillies led the league almost from opening day and in September they collapsed like the Mets just did.

We who lived through it will never forget it. Just the way we will never forget what Tug McGraw said at the victory parade ceremony at JFK Stadium in October 1980. "New York can take this championship and -- STICK IT!" The Phillies defeated the Kansas City Royals in the 1980 World Series, incidentally. But Tug spoke for Philadelphia. Can you imagine a Phillies-Yankees World Series? Call it payback.

Continue reading "Yo, Adrian! We Did It!!" »

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