“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. - An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. - A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
Gathering in D. C.: The Tome of Truth
Camp David
He hated it when they assigned him to Rosebud, but the President thought that was funny, along with the rude nicknames that occasionally emerged during meetings. Along with the charisma, and it was the real thing there, the President had a nasty streak, especially when he was annoyed.
If he had been born looking different…….but he hadn’t. The problem was he looked soft and round no matter what he tried to do about it. Which, really, was pretty damn little; he had always been unathletic.
It had been a thrill to come up here for the first time after the inauguration. Reading about all of the Presidential privileges and perks had been his favorite form of fantasy when he was young. The other boys snuck Playboys and bought pornographic movies, but he liked to read about the men who had occupied the Oval Office, living the life of power. He had always known his entrée to power would have to be different. Along with having the charisma of a mud pack and the tubby form, complete with a baby face, he also knew perfectly well that he lacked the family ties you needed. The less said about his family in public, the better.
He would always be one of those people who exercised power in the background, though in his case he was a pretty foreground background person. He had kept track religiously of the articles and books written about him, following them, their sales and the related commentary on line. He had spent nights just googling his own name and reading the references. That still gave him a heady rush.
“Craig!” They are looking for you in the meeting room. Is everything ready? Have Pork and Fred arrived?”
Humstead pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.
“I am sure they have, Mr. Vice President. This is an important meeting and we talked about the agenda last night.”
“You know what you are doing.” The Vice President looked Humstead over.
“Have you ever considered getting some exercise?”
The gathering here at Camp David was planned as a follow up to the series of meetings held at the beginning of the shake down period following the inauguration. Invited were highly placed members of the Branch administration, representatives from various think-tanks and Fredrick Barry, the well known and respected author of A Tome of Truths, as well as Pork Glibheart, the former Congressman from Georgia who served as Speaker of the House and was well known as the architect of the Contact with America.
As the attendees walked in, the Navy enlisted men assigned to this duty served them coffee along with the finely rolled small pastries made by the Navy chef.
Camp David had originally been called Shangri-la by FDR, who was the first to use the camp carved out of land acquired for a National Park. Changed to Camp David by President Eisenhower, the facility now included a pool, putting green, driving range, tennis courts and gymnasium, along with the scattering of small ‘cabins’, the Presidential ‘cabin’ and the main facility.
On the agenda for the day were a series of items that continued the theme that the President’s administration in Texas had begun, blending issues of presumably bipartisan interest for favors of various kinds. Running for office costs money.
A glance at the document told the informed reader that it had been produced by Craig Humstead. Humstead was famous for injecting the potential for profit into how issues became practice. It also showed the Humstead was, as always, thinking ahead both to the election now just eighteen months in the future and the election in ’04 that would ensure that this President Branch served the two terms allowed by law. The plan drew murmurs of admiration from those assembled; a fully articulated and well thought out plan with in depth contingencies demonstrated how this administration could maintain a grip on the political advantages they now enjoyed.
The first item on the agenda was the proposal to be rolled out first in California. The Home Schooling Movement was becoming a problem. It would have to be handled. Fredrick Barry was the man who the administration picked to do the job.
The President, always punctual, walked in on the dot, preceded by Secret Service. This was different from the last administration.
Fred Barry had been putting together his Pre through Graduate program for some time now. He had originally tried to sell it to the public directly, but they were not buying, noticing that it was both far more costly and less well written than they could get elsewhere, sometimes for free. But if parents who chose to home school were forced to use the Barry program, then suddenly the flow of funds into his pockets would help offset the drop off in income from his books, whose sales were now deteriorating. And while Barry’s income was diminished, his spending had not. This quid pro quo could produce benefits all the way around and would be exhaustively discussed.
The President let Humstead open the meeting.
“As you know, education was one of the cornerstones of our campaign,” Humstead glanced at the President, who was sipping his coffee. “And to carry through with the promises we made the American people, it is essential that we not permit children to slip through the cracks into a neglected education.”
Humstead looked around the room. Everyone was politely attentive. After some more introductory remarks he handed the floor over to Fredrick Barry, who went to the podium that had been set up at the end of the room. The assembled were treated to a twenty minute dissertation on how well the Berry school curriculum worked. Fred had always liked hearing himself talk. Finally the President thanked him and told him to sit down.
Now the business could begin. Humstead took remarks from around the table; all were favorable to seeing that the Barry School became the only school of choice for home schoolers in America. That phase having been handled, the next began.
All issues are really about more than one issue.
It had long been noticed that kids that were home schooled usually did better when they went on to college, but this trend had been growing in various parts of the country. More parents were pulling their kids out to home school while still paying the taxes that supported the pubic schools. One would think that this would actually mean the schools had more money to spend on fewer kids. But that is not how it worked. They had fewer funds since the money was allotted by the number of pupils; but worse than that when the home schooled kids started out performing kids from public schools, the trend accelerated. The home schooled kids moving through college were different in other ways. They asked a lot of questions. A few kids like that were not bad. But what if this trend further accelerated through the next ten years? It could be bad, feeding the crazy fringe edge. A stable society demanded conformity. It was their job to provide that, and Fredrick Barry had the right tools and reputation to make that stick.
There was an uneasy murmuring when this point was hit. Humstead always kept an eye on the crazy fringe; they broke out in ways that could cause problems at inconvenient times.
The fringe crazies had been some of the forces that powered Humstead’s campaigns to victory, used in combination with well placed disinformation of the opposition. They were useful, but they needed to stay under control. Everyone in the room knew who they were; the evangelicals waiting for the Rapture, gun lovers clutching their weapons, Libertarians, talking incessantly, writing obsessively, and in between times fondling their gold or smoking their pot. Some of the people here had been drawn from their ranks; but now their 401Ks were invested in the coming status quo. Some of them had made it to Congress and beyond.
The head of the FED, the man who provided what stability America still had, was once a gold dollar sign sprouting crazy himself.
This was the stuff of which the American political scene was composed.
Using such groups to actually help shape public opinion and so get the desired outcomes was what Humstead was about. He was a master in the fine art of drawing all of the threads together in ever and ever finer divisions to be reassembled as an electoral whole. When that looked like it was going to fail, he just cheated.
The morning session wound down as the blood sugar of the attendees dropped. Fredrick Barry made cordial Goodbyes to his particular cronies and headed back to D.C. He had other plans for tonight.
Lunch was served by the Navy. The Chef outdid himself.
The afternoon session was more thinly attended, which had been Humstead’s intention. The President was absent, off playing golf and goofing around. He could only take so much “meeting bullshit” and then was happy to leave the details to Humstead and the VP, Dagwood Chinsbaum. Vice President Chinsbaum had served in the Dixon Administration and garnered valuable skills there before spending time in the corporate world and returning to politics.
As the afternoon wound down, the gathering moved towards the main agenda. Rhetorical obfuscations were dropped; this group understood exactly what was really happening.
The Vice President especially was very conscious of the need to keep obvious paper trails from ever coming into existence. Humstead had not been in on the Dixon administration but had defined the same principles for himself. Therefore they had adopted direct lines of contact, using face to face communications for sensitive information and utilizing the same contacts over and over again to reduce the potential for leakage. For this reason, the tier of journalists and pundits who liaisoned with the administration was kept small; each had one or two sub linkages for the purpose of planting information into the media at large so that deniability was maintained.
Those who are ‘destined to rule’ have tools and the tools have names and receive compensation in many different forms.
One of the tools, Tom Dicks, had been promised a job in the administration writing speeches. He had already been working with the team for years. It had been Dicks that had gloated over having driven Jeb Franks, the small town attorney and friend of former President Quince, to suicide. His weapon had been his columns in the Canal Street Journal. That had not bothered President Branch, but the law suit for slander and libel just now ending and other rumors did bother him; those had a sexual component. Dicks had gotten a firm no on this appointment with promises of better things to come down the road. He knew he could rely on Humstead. They had so much in common and Dicks knew too much for it to be otherwise.
The NeoCon agenda was as focused as any campaign Humstead had ever run. Humstead knew he did not control this one; he was driving but others owned the roads and needed to be cut into the deal.
Over the course of the afternoon they put together a list of possible nominees for the Supreme Court, put out the word to the Hamiltonian Society again to hurry along the right kind of names for federal judgeships, and then considered the spin and shape they wanted to solidify their positions.
The campaign’s reliance on the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party created by politicizing those churches that believed in a Second Coming in the near future had always been a weak point. Not only was the list of issues that constituency could understand short, it was also nearly impossible to deliver. And while some constituencies were satisfied with rhetoric, this constituency became restless if they did not see action. In the absence of action they needed elaborate massages of ever more strident rhetoric. Fortunately, this President could do that believably.
The President had promised a renewed focus on the family and the introduction of pro-life legislation. President might even have believed the main stream of America would swallow the line; he had ended years of drunken irresponsibility by joining a prayer group. He was now very visible about his own evangelical faith. Humstead knew that the Evangelical Agenda could not happen in America. Now. But with changed circumstances many things were possible. As long as the rules continued to be applied to others, none of the NeoCons really cared very much.
The think tanks came in two varieties. First, there were those that actually had originated from libertarian free-market thinking; those were sources of ideas that had tremendous appeal both in legislatures and with the public. Branch had run for President on such an idea. The Cicero Institute had originated the idea of privatizing Social Security even before it actually existed as an entity. The original white paper had been written for a Libertarian Presidential campaign controlled by Cicero’s founder, Morton B. Casterol, Jr., in 1980. The present reincarnation of the idea was really no different, but it had been marketed to perfection. That was due to the smooth delivery of Casterol, aided by the large funding base for Cicero. Petroleum interests were well represented there.
The other kinds of nonprofits were actually tactical centers more directly controlled by their funders. Many of those did exhaustive reports where critical points could be massaged.
Each of these kinds of nonprofits had been invaluable tools to helping reshape the present flow of ideas into the mainstream. But the women’s movement itself had been especially helpful in this regard. Since they had flattened their noses on the failure of the ERA they had wandered off into irrelevancy, marginalized with barely a nudge from the opposition.
Humstead looked around the room. He had made an in depth study of where these individuals had originated. This administration was an amazing conglomeration of ideological sources largely reformatted by the through line justifications of Leo Strauss. Greed and a justification; that was really all any ruling class needed. Humstead had few illusions. Others might buy the notion that those long-winded, esoteric discourses held water; he only cared that they worked.
Many of the brightest people here, the most useful, had ironically originated in the Libertarian Movement. Others, the formal Neocons, had come in to the Republican Party in the late 70s with the Opals. Originally from the Red Left, they had made a smooth transition into the Republican Party bringing with them the internal strategies that had enabled the creation of this administration, weaving together the old line petroleum interests with these other unlikely bedmates.
Reconfiguring the expectations of the American public had come a long way. Those changes would continue under his leadership.
Listening to Pork talk on about the appointment of Federal judgeships and his take on how to use privatization and deregulation, Humstead idly wondered at the willingness these supposedly ideological types had shown in effectively selling out their precious ideals. He smiled. Under the skin, no matter where they came from, they were a lot alike.
The last presenter was Terrance Trotter, the former governor of Wisconsin now heading up Health and Human Services. He brought with him the good news that his bureau had smoothed out the number of placements and adoptions and that it was an upward trend. Several members of Congress had invested in ventures that made caring for kids removed from homes their business. Ron LeFay of Texas, the Majority Leader, owned four that ran at a brisk profit.
The meeting closed with the agreement that defunding the Civil Rights Commission and the agency for Public Integrity would be good cost cutting measures. After all, anyone with a complaint was probably a troublemaker anyway.
Before the meeting was adjourned a reading list was passed out, compiled by Humstead. These were the books to be read and pushed from on high to those whose duty it was to understand and follow. To the standard list of the works of Strauss had been added, The Mind of the Arab, the book purported to explain why the culture and mind of the Arab was essentially inferior and flawed. Humstead reiterated the expert brought in from the think tank that it was essential to understand just how different Muslims were from other people. This information would be disseminated throughout indicated agencies and bureaus. The right information guarantees the right outcome.
Dave had read the Tome of Truths while still at Moundville and sincerely admired it as a wealth of positive values. Fredrick Barry has struck him as a man who was sincerely dedicated to the values he espoused. Seeing him here at the Daughters Hotel in D.C. was a mild surprise. Dave turned around while checking into the ornate and prestigious hotel to find him next in line. They had chatted for a while at an exclusive cocktail party at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia the year before.
“Oh, hello sir!” Dave stuck out his hand. Barry smiled broadly and shook.
“Well, good to see you again. Elder, is that right? Getting old now,” Barry’s voice dropped a little to indicate the ridiculousness of this assertion and then rose slightly in inquiry.
Laughing and a little embarrassed Dave shook his head.
“I know how many people you meet. I am honored you remember. Are you here for something special?” Dave himself was here to follow up the inquiry on the mule who had brought in the drugs that killed George Weston, but his cover story was that he was making a visit to Cicero Institute and doing some sight seeing.
“Work. We have put together a great curriculum for home schoolers, preschool through graduation, and the administration wanted a presentation on the project.” He smiled engagingly. “So I was up at Camp David today.”
“Wow. I will be looking for news. Will you be speaking on the program anywhere soon? I’d like to find out more about it.”
Barry handed him a business card with the logo of the project and the website.
“Go take a look, and do keep in touch!”
“I will do that – and next time I see you I will make sure to have my book so you can autograph it, if you would?”
“My pleasure.” Barry grinned widely.
Just then the queue cleared in front of him, and with the good manners of a properly raised young man Dave asked Barry to precede him to the check in desk.
Thanking him, Barry moved up to the counter.
Dave had met Barry for first time at Moundville just outside the parent’s motel rooms on campus. Barry had left Dave with some inspiring words on the conduct of life. The words of wisdom had stayed with Dave, moving him almost to tears. Dave briefly considered confiding his concerns about the direction of the Administration to the elder statesman, but Barry nodded and walked away as soon as he was checked in.
Charlotte, North Carolina – January 30, 2001
Helen woke up late that morning. The kids were all still sleeping. There were ten of them now, all happy and doing well. Having ten children was a lot of work but it was truly its own reward. They were poor, especially now that John had suffered the reverses that had forced them to move to a smaller house. A year ago the skip loader he had rented to do a big job opening up a new tract of land for the building of houses had been stolen. He had left it there on a Thursday night and when he returned at dawn the next morning it was simply gone. He had hardly been able to believe it. Walking around, looking at the place it had stood, he had felt frozen in shock.
The aftermath had been ugly. He had finished the job on time and alone but he had hauled every single block for the foundation work on his own back. He had made a promise to the owner and would not renege. A real man lives his word. Helen had been worried. He came home at nearly midnight every night, having worked under the glare of lights he took out and placed so he could see. It had helped some.
The children had really felt it. For them the best time of the day was when Da-Da came home. One of them would look for him and as soon as his old truck drew into the long dirt driveway they were all out there, clamoring for a game. He rarely disappointed them. Sides were chosen and the teams took up their positions. Depending on the time of the year they played basketball, baseball or kick ball. It didn’t matter to any of them what game; it mattered that they were together.
The littlest ones would watch from the sidelines, looking forward to the time when they, too, could play.
Mama loved watching, if she had time. There was a lot to do around the house with ten kids, even though they all tried to help.
Meals were fun. Helen and John had decided early on that in accordance with the principles of home schooling they would try to make everything fun and interesting. While they had little money, they possessed enormous intelligence and imagination. They had been forced to move to a far smaller house when the skip loader was stolen. Living in part of it, they were fixing up the other half. The deal they had made with the owner would, hopefully, in a year or so, enable them to recover from the losses and continue to build towards their dream.
John was going to build them a house. They had been planning and hoping on this wish for years now. Having a big house in the country with a lot of land for the kids to roam and explore was a dream worth having. Every few days they would pile in the old car and go looking at houses, trying to decide what they all wanted their ‘house’ to look like. Marlow wanted a bay window in his room. Ezekial wanted it to be white with siding. And so it went down the line, with each child excited about something. House looking was enjoyed, discussed, leading on to other subjects. No matter where you start you can lead the learning on to many other things.
They talked about the House sometimes when Mama was making them their lunch; their very favorite was tuna fish salad sandwiches, lavishly supplemented with pickle relish and accompanied with chips and fresh squeezed lemonade. They all helped assemble the places and silverware and napkins for a picnic on the take outside in the back yard. They all helped with clean up, too.
No one touched their food until Mama had said the simple grace that began every meal. “Dear God, bless our family, keep us safe as we live with You. Amen.”
The back yard was an acre of places to play, hedged in with black berry bushes. The family had planted strawberries as well and when they were in season breakfast was frequently enlivened by the preproduction of the berry crew, lead by Mama out into the morning light to pick berries that still carried tiny droplets of mist on their shiny surfaces. The back yard also held the very minutely examined growth of cucumbers and tomatoes that were both supplement for the table and part of the ongoing educational process of the curriculum of the Mitchell School. Mama became used to the discussions of how red a tomato must be to be ripe. She found uses for those that really were too green but came in clutched in excited little hands anyway.
Mama loved that moment when they were all together eating and settled in, talking about everything under the sun.
School was serious fun. In the beginning it was Da-Da who was their main teacher with Mama doing the reviews each morning to ensure they remembered their lessons.
Every day had been hectic and amazing, full of lessons learned and work completed until the day the Department of Social Services walked in and took them.
Later Helen had felt as if her heart had been clipped out and frozen. But right then she had just frantically wanted to talk to someone, someone who would tell her that this couldn’t be happening, that it was a mistake.
The fat, bulging eyed agent from the DSS had pushed her way into the house, refusing to explain herself. A row of vehicles waited out there. Men in uniform stood at the women’s back like bodyguards. Helen had begged them not to take her children.
When it was clear that they would take them by force if necessary she pulled herself together and helped the children, bewildered and big eyes, crying and afraid, to dress.
The next to littlest Maggie, just two and a half, had clung to her while they dragged her from her arms and coldly strapped her into the car seat. The bulgy eyed woman had been terse and threatening.
Helen stood there watching after them until the last vestige of the cars carrying away her life disappeared in a distance muted with dust.
No one would help. No one could help.
New Zealand
Gladys did not go to the 1993 conference in Rio de Janeiro. She refused to dignify it with the attention. She often wondered what had gone wrong with the environmental movement that she and so many others had poured their lives into creating. Even Mother Earth Day had been stolen, changed in subtle ways that transformed its meaning.
Over the years she had noticed the percolation of individuals into the organizations. For a long time she just observed, then, alarmed she began discussing what she was seeing with Sam Symington. At first he had thought she was crazy. That had ended abruptly at some point during the Rio Conference in 1992.
Sam had first become active in the Environmental Movement in the late 60’s as a shiny new graduate from Georgetown School of Law in D.C. It was the sight of a whale breaking through the water off shore during a boat ride that had focused his attention on the amazing intelligence and beauty of these huge mammals.
There had been two of them; two whales of slightly different sizes, had circled the boat as he and the other small party gasped in amazement.
It was one of those perfect spring days that are all too rare off New England. On land it was black fly season. He and two buddies from college had come up from Georgetown for spring break and decided, instead of booze and over indulgence, to go whale watching on the Captain Ahab Tour Boat. Sam had no idea what to expect. Captain Ahab, at least that is what he called himself for the tourists, powered the boat out from the wharf as the small party of tourists stood peering into the water, hoping for a glimpse of a Humpback. They encountered the whales 45 minutes out. These two seemed at least as curious as the tourists. They circled the boat, coming up to spray and to peer at the gawking tourists over and over again. Then they would carve back into the sea, their bodies invisible as soon as they were beneath the surface. Sam had found himself staring right into the huge eye of the larger Humpback as he broke the surface and hung in the air not five feet from his face. He could hear the whale breath through its blow hole. He thought, just for an instant, that he could feel the air from the blowhole on his face.
As they returned to their motel room that night Sam could not stop thinking about the intelligence he had seen in those eyes. It was an epiphany. He began to include books first on whales and then mountain gorillas and other endangered species in the piles of books necessitated by this last year of classes. He had become a man with a mission.
He took his youth and enthusiasm into the movement, emerging only briefly to actually practice law for the next thirty years. A bisexual, he never married. In some sense he had married that day when he looked straight across into the eyes of a Humpback who had spoken to a place deep within his soul. His humanity had looked and found an echo that crossed the lines of species.
He met Gladys at the United Nations while serving on the Youth Council for the Environment. Gladys, always helpful, was their liaison to the office overseeing the activities of the non-governmental organizations. Perhaps it was his enthusiasm and lack of experience that kept him from seeing the things that were growing ever more obvious to Gladys.
For Sam it was the disappearance of the bicycles in Rio. He had begun to notice small indicators but dismissed them. The number of petroleum industry functionaries who were surfacing as liaisons or actual representatives from various countries had begun to disturb him. The stipends, frequently in the tens of thousands of dollars allotted to figures that were the titular heads of pivotal committees, became more and more obvious. Once such an appointee was in place, owing a huge portion of their income to the petroleum company that funded the research, it was all over.
The noble ideas that they were working to make an accepted world-wide policy somehow never made it past a vote that made everyone feel good but resulted in no substantial difference to the disappearing world of Nature. Sustainable development, such an innocent sounding couple of words, became a justification for anything a corporation wanted.
But the bicycles were tangible. At the Rio Conference the agenda was broken up by days with the issues of concern grouped, some pivotal meetings came off immediately, others were scheduled at the end. Looking over the schedule Sam had been perplexed. Conversations with Gladys seeped back into his mind. He had told her she was paranoid.
Then in the middle of the Conference the bicycles that had made the very spread out locations tolerable disappeared. With no transportation, delegates only went to those meetings closest to them; housing had been assigned and delegates were limited to those meetings closest to their hotel rooms. The meetings that needed broad representation to ensure fair outcomes slide through into the pockets of the petroleum industry.
Leaving Rio, Sam felt as if he had been pressed by a steamroller. As soon as he was home he called Gladys. Soon afterwards he reopened a law office in Wellington, New Zealand and began raising sheep. It kept his mind occupied. He and Gladys kept in touch. Someday, maybe, there would be something they could do.
Sam put the paper down slowly, folding it back into its original form. The paper would be carefully recycled; Sam over the years had become more and more aware of the need to live within the flow, as the growing Green Movement, put it. The eye of the Humpback had stayed with him over the years; every feature had been so distinct. The article he had just read had nothing to do with whales, but it was the eye of the whale that had still hung in his mind as the many inexplicable events of the last thirty years began to fall into place. He remembered his many conversations with Gladys. She had been right – and now he could see something that could be done.
Looking back over the past twenty-five years, no, really the past fifty years saddened her. She called her daughter in San Francisco and they talked about her newest grandson, just turned five, and Joyce passed on to her greetings from Bradley Montgomery, a former classmate at Stanford Business School who was now serving in the State legislature of New Mexico. They had never agreed politically--Bradley was an unregenerate Libertarian, but they had remained friends, sharing a common interest in the environment. Bradley was a real outdoorsman. Joyce and Gladys talked briefly on how odd Bradley was, a Libertarian who cared about the environment.
Everyone on the left knew that they were the only ones who cared about the environment.
Joyce mentioned that Sam Symington has passed through town, stopping by on his way to England. He had told Joyce, if she talked to her mother, to tell her he would be in touch on the way back. He wanted to sit down for a good long talk.
San Francisco, CA
Loyal Barrington had been the head of Green4Peace International when the Rainbow Marine was first dedicated to the protection of the planet in the 70s. That had been a lifetime ago now, and he was troubled by the way Green4Peace had changed over the years. Loyal found that disturbing, but did not know what to do about it. He had moved on in life, setting up a lucrative law practice in San Francisco. Most of the newbies, newly involved activists, did not even know that he had overseen the most exciting and significant period of Green4Peace history. But Loyal remembered. He could have been the kind of President who sat the office but he had insisted on staying in their faces himself, sailing with the Rainbow Marine as they challenged the whaling fleets. It had not been a risk free pastime, and he knew that.
He had been a cult hero for a short while. But it was still odd to get a letter like this, and in the snail mail, too. Now, most of his communications came in over the internet.
The guy, Bernard Hightower, has employed by Green4Peace in Massachusetts and was concerned about what he saw happening to the organization. Well, so was he. But now he had a mortgage and responsibilities. Loyal wrote the man a brief note, letting him know that while he shared his concerns there was nothing he could do now.
Three days later Bernard opened the letter. That was the night he had began drinking.
Tough Talk – summer 2001
The commentators continue to talk and be paid.
Dormer Bradshaw: "Is the VP going to help or hurt the gender gap?"
Ludmilla Fig: "Oh I don't, I don't think he could help bring any women along."
Dormer Bradshaw: "Too pro-life?"
Perk Story: "He's too pro-life and, more importantly, too pro-gun. I mean, gosh, you look back on his votes on guns and they are, they're incredible. He voted against every gun control imaginable. He voted against the cop killer bullets or against the plastic guns. I mean, just incredible. And this is an issue that's really resonating this time around. And he, it doesn't, it doesn't matter whether it's a message that's very strong. I think the message will be very strong to women."
Perk Story on abortion: "Still a hot issue,
Perk Story on abortion: "Still a hot issue,
Ludmilla Fig: "I think it's a hot issue but it's an issue that's not gonna make, it's not the deciding issue."
Perk Story: "Do you know any pro-life women reporters?"
Ludmilla Fig smiles
Perk Story: "I don't know any! I'm not gonna ask you. I have never come up with any. But anyway."
Canal Street Journal editorial writer Tom Dicks joked: "Let's have some affirmative action. We need some pro-choice women; or any women!"
Perk Story: "Yeah, affirmative action on that issue."
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