The Future of Dissent, Obstruction and Treason...a post-election speculation

The frantic flailing around for a message from the Romney camp has been comical to watch but it is accompanied by more sinister and disturbing events as well that aren’t nearly as funny.   As the poll numbers continue to swing in Obama’s favor and Romney’s climb to the presidency seems more and more far-fetched, the reactionary forces of divisiveness are making a feverish, last ditch effort to save him and are fighting like a terrified poodle thrown into the middle of a lake.   

The usual nitwits in the right wing media are bloviating at full blast in a brazen attempt at mass obfuscation.   If they raise the decibel level high enough maybe everyone will just cover their ears and, by doing so, miss the incoherent and hysterical nonsense coming out of Romney’s mouth.   I have to admit, watching bony-assed blonde skank Ann Colter on The View trying to tell Whoopi Goldberg what black people think was hilarious.   But Colter and Rush Blowhard and Hannity and Beck are clowns whose circus – unfortunately – will never pack up and leave town in a trail of elephant shit and big shoes.

So while reasonable conservative voices like David Brooks and George Will and even William Kristol – and I can’t believe I’m saying that – seem resigned to Mitt’s implosion and ultimate drowning, tea party congressional operatives and Brown Shirt governors intent on voter suppression in the name of fighting imaginary voter fraud are working harder than ever to rally the mob to the White House gates with torches blazing and pitchforks held high.   The hatred and frustration are palpable. 

I listen to Brooks on NPR today and when asked to characterize the state of the race, he gave a verbal shrug of his shoulders and said, basically, Romney’s fucked it up beyond all measure and the only thing left to do is get into the betting pool and guess how many electoral votes he’s going to get. 

Romney's obstructionist colleagues in the congress – before taking recess until after the election – tossed a procedural stink bomb from the balcony beforehand, killing a veteran’s jobs bill that was fully funded and drafted by republicans as well as democrats.   Anything to deny Obama a victory, even if they look like treasonous chicken hawks in the process.  They had no explanation and their particular constituency probably doesn’t require one or maybe couldn’t understand it if it was provided.   They see everything through the lens of Obama-hate and pissing on his shoes trumps even taking care of kids damaged by ridiculous misadventures in imperial dick measuring contests like Bush’s war with Saddam Hussein.  So sad; a puffed up Texas frat boy starting a war of honor with a third rate Stalin wanna-be that ends tragically – if predictably – for hundreds of thousands and the shameless republican heroes in congress then deny our soldiers a hand up to rejoin the job market.   Maybe these middle aged white men don’t think of returning veterans – many of whom are minorities – as worthy of a hand.  Or maybe they’re brainwashed into thinking there is some cockamamie Ayn Rand-ian principle at stake – as if the soldiers haven’t proven themselve self reliant enough at this point.

VP choice and prince regent in waiting, Paul Ryan is also creating as much distance as he dares to, privately complaining bitterly about the disorganization and lack of a focused message put forth by Romney’s advisors.   Hey Paul; this is what happens when naked ambition meets the cartoonish reality that is the current republican party and maybe – since you’ve been a part of it for 14 years – you should have had some inkling that hubris and a bucket of preposterous lies could be overcome by the simple incompetence of the dullard you chose as a nominee.

So the question becomes, what happens November 7^th in the aftermath of a Romney loss – potentially, a blowout loss?   Is it reasonable to assume the ignorant and disenchanted citizens of the far right are going to capitulate and move forward in a spirit of patriotic cooperation?   Are the delusional religious fanatics suddenly going to reconsider a more secular path in life and have compassion and empathy for those whose lives are far different from theirs?   Are the greed heads and corporate whores going to see the light of altruism, close their accounts in the Caymans and work in soup kitchens on the weekends?  Somehow I don’t think so.   In fact, there is an ominously grim vibe lurking under the babble of excited voices in these last 30 days before the election. 

It wasn’t so long ago that the misguided white Hitler youth Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City and delivered a terrifying wake up call to the country.  Tragically, some people are still asleep. 

It’s easy to understand how the ignorant become the fearful become the haters and eventually become the bombers.  They see no options.  And the right wing fear mongers who are making a living being paranoid, hyperventilating blowhards aren’t going to stop; not while they’re still being paid a fortune for vomiting incendiary gibberish over the public airwaves. 

 I enjoy target shooting; I have several old WW II vintage rifles and enjoy shooting them much like someone would enjoy taking a 48 Ford coupe out for a drive once in a while.  And during trips to the gun range I often encounter people – always men – who scare the shit out of me, who look as if they don’t leave their room much and who can be seen methodically unpacking semi-automatic .223’s or enormous hand guns worthy of Dirty Harry.  Watching them shoot, there is no sense of joy or even enjoyment – only a kind of grim determination that’s deeply unsettling.

I don’t know how much of the bitterness and hatred that seems to flow easily from the far right is hyperbole, an isolated group of people whose rants are taken out of context or blown out of proportion.  But I do think the political climate is fractured and a game changing Obama victory might be the last straw for some.  If that happens the tea party voices who have spent the last four years encouraging sedition will have to answer to everyone else at last.

Mitt spits the bit in moment of unscripted candor...

There’s not a lot more that can be said about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that hasn’t already been said recently and if I pummeled him like I’m inclined to, it would just seem cruel; like piling on, kicking him when he’s down, lashing him to the roof of the car and driving for 8 hours in 50 degree temperatures.  No, that’s not my style.  I have no problem eviscerating the guy when he seems like a viable threat but to continue to hammer him now for all of the stupid, thoughtless, hysterical things he’s said in the last couple of weeks would be unseemly.

                                                                           
But much can be said about his party and, more specifically, the power guys in the party.  And make no mistake about it; they’re all men - men that smell like Cuban cigars and old money.   I’m sure they sitting around somewhere wondering how they fucked this up but if they could see beyond the bubble in which they all seem live, it’s really very simple.

They thought they could just throw their jock straps out onto the field and beat Obama this year.  A lot of things were in their favor; their criminal co-conspirators in the congress had successfully sabotaged any and all attempts by the president and the democrats to fix the economy, using the filibuster more times than during any other administration in history to block every initiative Obama naively put forth.  People were still hurting and by and large he was getting the blame.  But this overconfidence led to their current doomed situation and the candidate who is looking more like a monumental loser every passing day. 

Looking back it’s so obvious what happened; while it looked as if Obama was wounded, it also looked as if the problems plaguing him were long term with no easy solutions.  Anyone winning in 2012 was going to be in a position of “put up or shut up”, with enormous pressure to turn simplistic political promises into action; meaning jobs and economic growth.  At a time of global economic chaos there is only so much an American president can do.  My guess is, the smart guys in the room – guys like Christie and Rubio and Rob Portman – took a look around at the train wreck that Bush created and decided that running another day might be the wiser course, the better to preside over a more prosperous part of the 21^st century.  One by one they demurred.

That left the field open to what turned out to be a madcap clown car full of delusional quacks and long shots and, of course, Romney, who probably figured it was his turn.  Surveying the field and seeing the likes of Bachman and Santorum speaking in tongues, the nutty professor in Gingrich, long-time candidate Ron Paul and cockamamie pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain probably reinforced his belief that he and Ann could start picking out new curtains for the White House and not worry about the troubling details – like having some kind of coherent message.

What he didn’t expect – and what the suits with the cash didn’t foresee – was that this far-right field would suck the whole party to the edge of the cliff and cause moderates and independents to run away in terror.  Ceding the campaign to the tea party-wing made for a lot of bold talk but compressed the base so that when Mitt has a month like the last one – where he is buried in an avalanche of his own ignorance – there’s no one left to support him and his poll numbers look like the stock market charts for January 2009.  When Peggy Noonan calls you out for looking like an incompetent hack, you’re in trouble.

In a final bit of irony, the default choice of Romney, rather than holding the party together to achieve the goal of recapturing the oval office for the republicans, has cleaved it into a more profound minority status by alienating those party loyalists not captive to religious fervor or the cult of personality embodied in nut-cakes like Grover Norquist.   This leaves behind fertile ground for the emergence of a viable third party.

For all that he has accomplished, Obama is far from the perfect fit for the country at this moment.  He has alienated many progressives and libertarians with drone strikes abroad and what is widely seen as an excessive expansion of government domestically.  His justice department has been a nightmare.  There is plenty of room for support to coalesce to his right.  Center leaning moderate democrats - blue collar workers and union supporters who are socially conservative and the more business friendly but socially liberal supporters - could easily join with socially moderate republicans willing to compromise on economic and taxation issues and get to a number that would make a third party candidate seem more credible than the fringe third party candidates – sincere and earnest though they may be – currently on the ticket. 

Now as Mitt frantically turns up in swing state pancake houses and chamber of commerce luncheons to fulfill the campaign’s newest strategy of re-introducing him to an increasingly skeptical public, the short term result seems pre-ordained; Obama wins comfortably and brings a few members of congress with him.  If – and this is a biggie – he gets enough congressional support to actually implement some of his heretofore blocked initiatives, this whole scenario may be delayed and we may have some new political star emerge from an energized democratic party to run in 2016.  If, however, he scrapes out a narrow win with a recalcitrant congress remaining to hump his leg and piss on his shoes for four years, my prediction is a very angry and disillusioned electorate in 2016 hungry for a change that goes beyond flipping the same two-party coin to try the other side. 

Could we have a viable third party to stand the political status quo on its head for the rest of the 21^st century?   The next six weeks may hold the answer.  Stay tuned and make sure to vote!

Mitt Romney strides mightly across the world stage, trips and falls on his face...

The grim black clouds that have been gathering over the Romney campaign ever since his convention -and what had to be a surprising media consensus that they came off as a bunch of ambitious, opportunistic liars - suddenly started pissing down rain this week as Mitt shoved both expensive loafers into his mouth with his preposterous reaction to the attack on the US embassy in Libya.  Just today I watched a number of heretofore Romney-leaning pundits who sound ready to wash their hands of the vacuous bastard and begin their planning for Jeb Bush in 2016.  Huzzah!!!  Nicely played, Mitt.  You and Karl Rove can now look forward to long winter nights amongst the fine leather and wood paneling in your New Hampshire vacation home, staring sullenly into the fire and pounding the 20 year old scotch while asking yourselves a series of tough questions, starting with WTF.

 David Brooks, syndicated columnist for the New York Times, thought to be a sober, intelligent man – a voice of reason in the conservative movement – was on Charlie Rose the other night bemoaning Romney’s thoughtless response and ill-conceived press conference – the one that left the press corp who follow him open-mouthed in disbelief.  Laura Ingraham, the snarky radio talk-show host and someone who apparently is part of the republican intelligentsia – commenting on the Romney blunders, suggested disbanding the party if they can’t beat Obama in this election.

Mitt, even Faux News is pissing on your shoes in frustration at your venal and self-serving yammering in the face of a national tragedy.  You don’t even have the good sense to understand the political protocol and hold your fire for 24 hours.   You come off like Sarah Palin with a penis.  

Of course, he had his defenders; Rush Blowhard blustered through his radio show repeating “he’s right, he’s right”, evidently drunk on the republican strategy of the endlessly repeated lie.  Bill Kristol, intellectual godfather of the modern republican party also followed this course, while notorious bleach-blonde, bony-assed skank, Ann Colter, embellished this line a bit by saying the media’s focus on Romney’s venality only served to prove he was right, thus hitting two favorite republican birds with one stone.

Watching Mitt stammer through the next day, after someone apparently told him what an ass he made of himself, was hilarious.   Now the trick for Democrats – and they’re not good at this – is, don’t get cocky, keep your eye on the ball, watch out for the voter suppression governors and other duplicitous members of Mitt’s shadowy cabal because surely to god they are not going to give up the fight even if they have given up on him.   He should be thankful Obama is black; without the closeted KKK vote Romney would be sitting at the bar in the Salt Lake City Hilton swilling gin and writing his concession speech.

Rick Scott in Florida is doubling down on his attempt to suppress the vote there in such a way as he should be in jail, not the governor’s office in Tallahassee and in spite of a court ruling against all such moves.  Pennsylvania and Ohio are deeply enmeshed in voter suppression efforts.  The Secretary of State in Kansas, totally off his meds, went full-on birther and threatened to keep Obama off the ballot, thereby negating the need for more conventional voter suppression.    I take this to be a good sign – here’s why;

Now in addition to trying to defend their incoherent domestic agenda of unsustainable tax cuts, increased defense spending, laissez-faire environmental and regulatory policy and eat-the-poor social policy, they have to set a back fire to protect their flank from the altogether reasonable perception that their candidate is a dangerous lunatic on the world stage  and more likely to blunder into world war III than do anything constructive to advance our interests and make the world safe for democracy.  What do they have left?  The only thing they can point to is that Romney isn’t Obama and while that may resonate with some of the knuckle-draggers and tin-foil hat crowd around the country it's likely not enough to carry the day and get 270 electoral votes.   So they have to amp-up the fraud, theft and treason wing of the party to salvage what they can. 

I suspect that little insect, Karl Rove, had a contingency plan all along.  If Romney pukes on himself focus on retaining a majority in the House and continue to hump Obama’s leg for another four years, hoping that the country is still wobbling on its axis in 2016 when another Bush can ride to the rescue and begin the New Republican Century – albeit, somewhat delayed.

Either way he wins – he continues to be the most notorious pimp in the biggest El Dorado and the right-wing world will still revolve around him.  That’s tragic for the last tattered vestiges of the former party of Lincoln, as the disenchanted moderates will continue to leave the party until all that’s left is an ungainly Ork army of delusional drones pinning for a country that was left behind 75 years ago.  Hey Karl – bitterness and anger are mighty motivational forces but eventually bitter and angry people just fall over dead and we’re all better off without them.   And if Obama and the democrats can’t govern successfully – and the jury is definitely still out about that – so be it.  I hear Tom Friedman has been hinting around about a third party – maybe 2016 is the year.