"Let me tell you how it will be - there's one for you, nineteen for me..."

There are few things I enjoy more than the hue and cry of anguished republicans complaining that the democrats are being meanies.  It really does my heart good.  After watching successive republican Romney surrogates and presidential wanna-be’s bitch-slap Obama for months with no real response in kind, watching them fulminate over some semi-hard hitting campaign ads is deeply satisfying. 

I think the reason it took so long for any kind of systematic democratic reply to the hallucinating fantasies being kicked around the right-wing, nut-case blog-a-sphere is Obama’s people were out of breath from laughing so hard they couldn’t catch their collective breath.  When you go back and look at the sorry-ass collection of delusional knuckleheads trying to win the nomination it’s plain to see the difficulty in taking them seriously.   Michelle Bachman…?  Really…?

But Romney – the fair-haired prince regent-in-waiting who managed to emerge from the sucking mud hole of the primaries – is now right there, walking around spewing whatever fabricated nonsense he’s told to spew so there is finally someone they can take seriously.  And as an extra happy circumstance, he is only slightly less of an amiable dunce than republican Zeus, Ronald Reagan. 

Now we have the patrician Romney complete with Swiss bank accounts, bags of money stashed in The Caymans and Bermuda, and a history of mercilessly managing companies with a slash & burn style that General Sherman would have admired, rolling up the sleeves on his $150 dollar dress shirts so he looks like a regular guy and yammering about Obama being out of touch with ordinary Americans.  I think the silver spoon that he has had in his mouth his whole life has finally pierced his medulla  oblongata.  

The howling shouts of “Hey, that’s not fair…” are only the least offensive of the noxious smoke cloud being generated on Mitt’s behalf as he tries in vain to come up with some plausible reason for defying years of tradition and not releasing his personal tax returns.  His wife, Ann – you know; the one driving Mitt around on a wave runner recently – has as much as said, screw tradition – we’re not giving you anything else.   This is the same woman who tried to portray her life as a stay-at-home- mom, living in luxury at one of the several Romney family compounds as being equivalent to the lives of working mothers across America – the same working mothers who would lose access to health care services like birth control, pap smears and safe, legal abortion, and would be denied the opportunity for equal pay for equal work and have to scramble to find child care if her husband is elected, all in the name of self reliance and personal responsibility.  Yeah, Ann; that really resonates. 

Worse – and, frankly, funnier – are the defenders of Romney’s obfuscation and dissembling over his finances and proposed budgetary priorities; Dick, “The Iguana” Cheney, staunch defender of the constitutional prerogative to torture suspects and send them off blindfolded to the kind of dank and stinking dungeons that probably haunt his dreams, is prominently featured. It’s a pretty sure bet he won’t be joining that bible study group trip to Israel any time soon.  Every terrorist within 500 miles would be strapping on the C-4 and booking a plane ticket.  John Sununu is another distinguished criminal emeritus of the glory years who piped up with some steaming horse shit this week in a stunningly idiotic rant that made the news, if only for being bizarre. 

And Tim Pawlenty, bitter first-loser in the primaries who is still apparently ambitious enough to be hoping for a position in the Romney cabinet, came to the defense of Romney’s fucking horse.  Really, Tim…?   The one for which they claim some kind of cockamamie tax deduction while looking down their nose at “those people” who happen to need government services for something legit – like eating. 

Of course we’ve come to expect people like Rush Blowhard to pontificate loudly to his audience of shut-ins and people wearing tin foil hats – “Why, Obama hates America…unequivocally”, as if the audience knows what that word even means.   And my personal favorite, only because I want to see him cry – is John Boner, Speaker of the House, in a spittle-flecked screed that was priceless, proclaiming that voters don’t want to know about Mitt’s tax returns, they want to know about jobs.  His sudden concern for the jobless would be touching if he and his treasonous cronies hadn’t spent the last three and a half years doing everything in their power to make sure we ended up in just this place at this time – four months to go before the election and the economy is still sputtering.   He contemptuously asked the rhetorical question, why isn’t the president more worried about the jobs of ordinary Americans, and I threw up in my mouth a little bit.  Hey John, in case you forgot, he proposed a job plan – unlike you and McConnell and rest of the Benedict Arnold Society up there on the hill – and you wouldn’t even vote on it.  Where is your proposal, by the way?  (Again, a rhetorical question since it has long been clear you don’t have one.)

No, the only way Obama is going to get anything done, including adding jobs, is if he wins and you and your buddies – young donation-slut Eric Cantor, tea party poster boy, Paul Ryan – all of you, get voted out of the majority and get the hell out of the way.  Then Obama can fail or succeed on the merits of the programs he implements, not because you pink-tie-wearing freaks won’t let him. 

And by the way, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, it’s time for you to go too.  I have never been witness to such utterly incompetent party leaders as the two of you.  Pack up your JFK posters and get the hell out of there with them. 

Anyway, where was I?  Ah yes – Romney and his taxes or lack thereof; I say if he doesn’t want to release them he shouldn’t have to – it will provide the big stick to use to make him into a piñata all summer long and provide a lot of laughs to anyone who appreciates irony at its best.

"It's only a lie, if YOU don't believe it..." G. Costanza

I will have to give the republicans credit; they have firm control of their messaging.  While the obtuse yet vapid nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney, struggles to put a positive spin on what increasingly appears to be a personal financial plan based largely on dodging taxes with mysterious off shore accounts, his colleagues, minions and surrogates blast away at Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income up to $250,000 per year but to restore them for any income in excess of that.  The democrats should be so coherent.   Instead we have the spectacle of 17 members of the House lining up with the crypto-fascists calling for the attorney general’s head on a platter and several cowardly members shamefully voting with the republicans to repeal the ACA and now oppose even this fairly responsible action to meet the ostensibly critical goal of deficit reduction and tax fairness.  I mean, let's face it; if you're bringing in net income over 250k, you're doing OK.

Romney’s struggle is the more amusing of these developments.  Watching him attempt to convince voters that he really has no knowledge of the nature of his tax-sheltered investments, where they are, why they’re there and that, moreover, it’s OK because he hasn’t broken any laws, is like handing the democratic national committee and big stick and saying, “Hit me”.    And they seem to have been able to get their arms around the idea and are calling for him to release his tax returns and explain how his avoiding paying more than 15% tax is patriotically American and appropriate behavior for a presidential candidate.   Good for them; lord knows they have been maddeningly inept at getting a coherent message of their own out even as Mitt and his treacherous cronies have given them a target rich environment that Schwartzkopf would salivate over. 

Mitt still hasn’t given us a single new idea about anything.  He is the personification of the anti-Obama-at-all-costs interests in the country and seems to be against anything and everything that Obama favors.  But asked to lay out a plan for economic progress should he be elected he reverts like Pavlov’s dog to an inane script about cutting taxes and regulations and repealing the health care law; that’s about it.  David Brooks, of the New York Times, insists that Mitt has a health reform plan that he is not yet sharing but that begs the question; what the hell is he waiting for?  Was there ever a better time to offer an alternative to Obamacare than in the immediate aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding it?  Instead he simply reverted to a vow to repeal it at his first opportunity, offering nothing to replace it even as there is wide agreement among republicans on the need for real reform.  Well, Mitt? 

He, along with every republican talking head in the land, is in a sputtering indignant froth selling the toxic notion – put forth in Justice Roberts’ decision – that the individual mandate is a tax and therefore an Obama flip-flop and broken promise and the largest middle class tax increase every, etc., etc.   Of course it was obvious the minute Roberts upheld the law based on this somewhat twisted notion of a tax that it would be seized upon by the Norquistians and used as a bludgeon.   Even as they were sitting around swilling the good scotch and cursing the day that Roberts was ever confirmed they were plotting to try to turn the tax idea to their advantage.   They conveniently ignore the issue of personal responsibility for the scofflaws as it doesn’t conveniently fit their “Don’t Tread on Me” narrative.  So the party ostensibly committed to libertarian personal responsibility is forced to advocate for leaving the sick and dying in the street to fend for themselves or letting them rip off the rest of us, getting sick on our dime – anything to oppose the POTUS on his main legislative achievement. 

Now that Obama has bitch-slapped them with a new glove – the extension of the Bush tax cuts on income up to $250,000 – the volume of tortured howling from the right has become deafening, with bug-eyed hyperbole and predictions of doom coming from all of the usual suspects.   The irony apparently escapes them, as it often does; Romney is hiding his money in secretive havens more often used by the drug dealers and the BeBe Rebozzo’s of the world than a normal presidential candidate while his party is doing its best to stir up the rabble with over-amped blather about gigantic tax increases and their imminent danger to the economy of the republic – the same economy that they have been blatantly trying to sabotage since 2008.  Statistics show that all of the loudly proclaimed concern for “small businesses” is a complete falsehood – estimates are that only 3% of small business owners will be significantly impacted by the tax and – very important – only on that portion of their net income that exceeds $250,000 per year.  

The level of toxic, treasonous bile coming from the right these days is a clear reflection of the losing streak they are currently on; the ACA, Arizona’s immigration law and now Obama hammers them with this tax issue.  There is a high degree of difficulty associated with their attempt to wiggle free of the pin and despite the millions and millions of dollars they have available, they may not be up to the task.

Now we have the photos of a wet and grinning Mitt, posed Dukakis-like on the back of a wave runner operated by his wife and presumably somewhere off the Hamptons or La Jolla or somewhere else that he has one of his auxiliary homes.  This is the single worst presidential candidate of my life time and the picture of him looking like a duffus clinging to his wife is an apt metaphor for his whole political life.   This is a guy who is running - terrified – from his one and only good idea like it’s a horde of zombies.  His campaign is based on distortion, fear, hatred and a whole series of noxious lies supported by a relative handful of billionaires and abetted by slimy money-grubbing allies in congress who are fighting desperately to carry out their four year-old marching orders; a systematic betrayal of their fellow citizens for the benefit of corporate sponsors and a racist tea party rabble clinging to the hope that things can go back to the way they imagine they used to be.   What a country.