Another republican pulls down the emperor's pants...

What follows is a letter from Ron Paul before he started to hit the pharmaceuticals too hard.  It lays out more solid evidence of what the republican party has become, personified by the criminals, grifters, thieves and pimps on stage tonight.  I couldn’t have said it better…

As a lifelong Republican, it saddens me to have to write this letter. My parents believed in the Republican Party and its free enterprise philosophy, and that's the way I was brought up. At age 21, in 1956, I cast my first vote for Ike and the entire Republican slate.

Because of frustration with the direction in which the country was going, I became a political activist and ran for the U.S. Congress in 1974. Even with Watergate, my loyalty, optimism, and hope for the future were tied to the Republican Party and its message of free enterprise, limited government, and balanced budgets.

Eventually I was elected to the U.S. Congress four times as a Republican. This permitted me a first-hand look at the interworkings of the U.S. Congress, seeing both the benefits and partisan frustrations that guide its shaky proceedings. I found that although representative government still exists, special interest control of the legislative process clearly presents a danger to our constitutional system of government.

In 1976 I was impressed with Ronald Reagan's program and was one of the four members of Congress who endorsed his candidacy. In 1980, unlike other Republican office holders in Texas, I again supported our President in his efforts.

Since 1981, however, I have gradually and steadily grown weary of the Republican Party's efforts to reduce the size of the federal government. Since then Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party have given us skyrocketing deficits, and astoundingly a doubled national debt. How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together? Tip O'Neill, although part of the problem, cannot alone be blamed.

Tax revenues are up 59 percent since 1980. Because of our economic growth? No. During Carter's four years, we had growth of 37.2 percent; Reagan's five years have given us 30.7 percent. The new revenues are due to four giant Republican tax increases since 1981.

All Republicans rightly chastised Carter for his $38 billion deficit. But they ignore or even defend deficits of $220 billion, as government spending has grown 10.4 percent per year since Reagan took office, while the federal payroll has zoomed by a quarter of a million bureaucrats.

Despite the Supply-Sider-Keynesian claim that "deficits don't matter," the debt presents a grave threat to our country. Thanks to the President and Republican Party, we have lost the chance to reduce the deficit and the spending in a non-crisis fashion. Even worse, big government has been legitimized in a way the Democrats never could have accomplished. It was tragic to listen to Ronald Reagan on the 1986 campaign trail bragging about his high spending on farm subsidies, welfare, warfare, etc., in his futile effort to hold on to control of the Senate.

Instead of cutting some of the immeasurable waste in the Department of Defense, it has gotten worse, with the inevitable result that we are less secure today. Reagan's foreign aid expenditures exceed Eisenhower's, Kennedy's, Johnson's, Nixon's, Ford's, and Carter's put together. Foreign intervention has exploded since 1980. Only an end to military welfare for foreign governments plus a curtailment of our unconstitutional commitments abroad will enable us really to defend ourselves and solve our financial problems.

Amidst the failure of the Gramm-Rudman gimmick, we hear the President and the Republican Party call for a balanced-budget amendment and a line-item veto. This is only a smokescreen. PresidentReagan, as governor of California, had a line-item veto and virtually never used it. As President he has failed to exercise his constitutional responsibility to veto spending. Instead, he has encouraged it.

Monetary policy has been disastrous as well. The five Reagan appointees to the Federal Reserve Board have advocated even faster monetary inflation than Chairman Volcker, and this is the fourth straight year of double-digit increases. The chickens have yet to come home to roost, but they will, and America will suffer from a Reaganomics that is nothing but warmed-over Keynesianism.

Candidate Reagan in 1980 correctly opposed draft registration. Yet when he had the chance to abolish it, he reneged, as he did on his pledge to abolish the Departments of Education and Energy, or to work against abortion.

Under the guise of attacking drug use and money laundering, the Republican Administration has systematically attacked personal and financial privacy. The effect has been to victimize innocent Americans who wish to conduct their private lives without government snooping. (Should people really be put on a suspected drug dealer list because they transfer $3,000 at one time?) Reagan's urine testing of Americans without probable cause is a clear violation of our civil liberties, as are his proposals for extensive "lie detector" tests.

Under Reagan, the IRS has grown bigger, richer, more powerful, and more arrogant. In the words of the founders of our country, our government has "sent hither swarms" of tax gatherers "to harass our people and eat out their substance." His officers jailed the innocent George Hansen, with the President refusing to pardon a great American whose only crime was to defend the Constitution.
Reagan's new tax "reform" gives even more power to the IRS. Far from making taxes fairer or simpler, it deceitfully raises more revenue for the government to waste.

Knowing this administration's record, I wasn't surprised by its Libyan disinformation campaign, Israeli-Iranian arms-for-hostages swap, or illegal funding of the Contras. All this has contributed to my disenchantment with the Republican Party, and helped me make up my mind.

I want to totally disassociate myself from the policies that have given us unprecedented deficits, massive monetary inflation, indiscriminate military spending, an irrational and unconstitutional foreign policy, zooming foreign aid, the exaltation of international banking, and the attack on our personal liberties and privacy.

After years of trying to work through the Republican Party both in and out of government, I have reluctantly concluded that my efforts must be carried on outside the Republican Party. Republicans know that the Democratic agenda is dangerous to our political and economic health. Yet, in the past six years Republicans have expanded its worst aspects and called them our own. The Republican Party has not reduced the size of government. It has become big government's best friend.

If Ronald Reagan couldn't or wouldn't balance the budget, which Republican leader on the horizon can we possibly expect to do so? There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government. That is the message of the Reagan years.

I conclude that one must look to other avenues if a successful effort is ever to be achieved in reversing America's direction.

I therefore resign my membership in the Republican Party and enclose my membership card.

Ron Paul - 1987

Read this or the kitten gets it...

I write this blog with a cynical, sarcastic, voice because it seems like a good way to highlight the inconceivable idiocy that I see in our current political environment.  I came of age as Kennedy was shot and the subsequent cast of characters in the White House and congress ever since has left me deeply cynical and despairing that my truly patriotic feelings for this country will ever be personified in the highest office in the land.  With Obama's election, I felt a surge of hope that I had not known since Nixon resigned.  I thought we had truly turned a corner in this country.  But as we have come to know over the last three years, a desperate, hateful, republican party has once again decided that its agenda is more important than actually saving the country from the deepest and most profound economic disaster in modern times; a shifting structural change that essentially means that many formerly middle class, blue collar, uneducated citizens will never again see the lifestyle they have felt entitled to by generations of precedent and the promise of the American Dream. 

Now Mike Lofgren, a career republican congressional staffer who has been at the heart of high level policy decisions in the international security arean for over 25 years has written a devastating analysis of what has been happening in the republican party for the last generation and which is seeing its zenith in the current treasonous hate campaign against a sitting president in a time of crisis; a campaign dedicated to seeing that he fail from the moment of his inaugeration. Lofgren has written a concise description of this political moment in time, one that - all sarcastic cynicism and snarkiness aside - I think is the most important thing I've read in the media in many years.  It's not mainstream; the mainstream is far too inhibited and intimidated and controlled by the very powers who are perpetrating this coup d'etat to really say these things.  But I think they are very, very important.  I hope that enough people read this, assimilate it, and can explain it to their fellow Americans before it's too late.  Read it - please...

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

2. They worship at the altar of Mars.  While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.

And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

The continuing story of Bungalo Mitt...

Mitt “I had a ministerial deferment” Romney got some headlines  with a series of cheap-shots at Obama in front of an audience at a VFW meeting in San Antonio, thereby demonstrating what a tough-ass guy he is and that his dick is at least as big as Rick ”Where’s my holster again?” Perry right there in his home state.   Romney seemed to following a typical republican script for talking about democrats, saying Obama was guilty of coddling our enemies with all kinds of peacenik gymnastics instead of charging right into the barbed wire like he certainly, probably, might do.  

Never mind that he joined Chief Chicken Hawk, Dick Cheney on the sidelines when thousands of their terrified peers were creeping through the Vietnamese jungle.  He is one tough mother and Obama is a softy whose foreign policy has done nothing to make American safer and encourages all manner of mischief and misbehavior and plus, the Arab Spring revolts are all because of brilliant long range republican strategy, hahminah, hahminah, hahminah…

Next I fully expect the republicans to trot out their aging stable of fossilized war criminals – Kissinger, Rumsfeld, etc. – to pile on and blame Obama for everything that hasn’t worked out and take credit for everything that has, all the while repeating the standard talking point; democrats are soft on defense.  Romney actually had the balls – or he was drunk – to suggest that Obama supporting the debt ceiling heist by the republican controlled House of Representatives was evidence of his hostility towards the military, since continued republican insistence on a budget that doesn't interrupt the croquet games in the Hamptons would mean that the defense budget would be cut along with social services and Obama would be to blame.  

And in a final blast, he puffed up his chest, turned so his good side was towards the cameras and said – I’m paraphrasing – negotiating with your enemies might be how they do things at Harvard but “it’s not what they know on the battlefield”; coming from Mr. Draft Dodger, a remark so stupid and insulting to a group of men and women who actually were on a battlefield, that you would expect him to get boo’d off the stage.   Maybe Mitt should check with the dead Taliban that are the result of constant drone strikes in Pakistan before deciding how much of a softy Obama is. 

The report just issued documenting 60 billion dollars wasted due to fraud, corruption and incompetence – and that’s what they can track – should give pause to the whole stable of republican neocons and the blockheads who loved them who were convinced, for whatever reason, that deposing a cartoon character like Saddam was worth the monetary cost as well as a couple of hundred thousand dead – after all – they were mostly Iraqis so who cares.  It was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate American exceptionalism and teach others who may cross us a lesson.  How’s that working out for you, fellas?  As Bill Maher noted, that 60 billion lost to waste and fraud is presumably on top of the trillion spent on the idiotic endeavor in the first place.  And while it’s true we haven’t “suffered an attack on our soil”, we have plenty of dead American soldiers on other soil and a comet hasn’t hit the Earth either.   I’m not clear what's coincidence and what’s correlation but I am quite sure the bad guys haven’t stopped trying. 

I’m not really interested in defending Obama’s Iraq & Afghanistan policies; I think that both have been  extremely ill advised exercises in perpetuating 50 years of American foreign policy blundering – an incredible, unimaginable waste.  But continuing Bush and the Neocon’s foreign policy of belligerent, bellicose posturing and aircraft carrier rattling certainly would have made it worse.  At least we’re trying to get our foot out of the muck.  

The Libyan revolt is a good example of what Obama faces from the “critical class”, the punditocracy, the chorus of profession experts who are only too happy to chime in on any subject, any time.  He was criticized for intervening to the limited extent he did and criticized for not doing more when it took longer than our short attention span media thought appropriate.  I would take Obama’s thoughtful, measured approach – even though I disagree with some of his decisions – over another half crazed mouth breather like Perry, who seems to have come right out of Blowhard University and just as likely to get all wound up and bomb somebody as not.   Bachman is waiting for the end of the world so I don’t exactly trust her to make intelligent decisions and Romney is the fair haired boy for corporate interests who are, generally speaking, more for war than against it.  It’s a scary god damn group.

Meanwhile, the content of Cheney’s auto-lie-ography is becoming more and more widespread and his reptilian visage is appearing everywhere you look because of his intentional crossing swords for one last time with Colin Powell and Ghaddafi’s pin up girl, Condy Rice.  When asked about the book,  Bush took a break from his usual summer reading – The Iliad, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dostoevsky, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and Valley of the Dolls – to weigh in on Cheney’s new book, saying, “It’s OK but I thought there’d be more pictures.”  I think Robert Sheer put it best in a post for The Nation:

"Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader."

A republican friend of mine once said to me, in the face of my bitching about Cheney, “Hey, you don’t need to convince me; Dick Cheney is a peckerhead.”  I think that says it pretty well. 

I wanna grow up, to be a politician...

Have you ever heard the expression, “That’s just God’s way of”… blank?  This phrase is ubiquitous and can be used in multiple circumstances and, like much of organized religion, is sort of nebulous.   After all, if god wanted to tell us something, would he be so oblique as to send a hurricane up the east coast in a willy-nilly display of his righteous wrath, sending millions of people heading for cover from Georgia to Maine?  Why would he do that?  What if we didn’t have Glen Beck, Michele Bachman, Pat Robertson and various other people with direct access to him to explain to us that Hurricane Irene was actually a blessing and god’s way of telling us that Washington needs to change its ways and get more in line with republican orthodoxy which reflects, after all, his true wishes. 

Obviously we need to start jailing queers, executing more criminals as fast as possible so their shifty-ass lawyers can’t delay their inevitable and richly deserved deaths, burn down all of the Planned Parenthood offices and hope the devil worshiping abortionists are trapped inside along with the cheap hussies who “counsel” poor innocent young girls about how to hump like minks in the most sinful way using birth control, obviously against his wishes.  Oh,  and exploit the earth and poor working slobs in as meaningful and efficient way as possible.  Amen…

Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to just go on CNN?  Or better yet, Faux News – maybe on Sean Hannity’s show or one of those shows with the air head bimbo anchorpersons reading utterly National Enquirer-esque “news” stories like how Obama got pissed off at the bicycle rental place on Martha’s Vineyard, went home and guzzled a quart of Tanqueray.  Lots of people would see it and, as long as they didn’t mistake it for some random person auditioning on America’s Got Talent he would get his point across in a much more direct way.   He’s God; he would know this, right?  It’s a rhetorical question…

In a follow up to something discussed here last week, a new report says that the pentagon has wasted 30 billion dollars on projects doled out to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last ten years and is in danger of having that number double if the Afghan and Iraqi governments choose not to continue projects already underway after we complete the pull out of American personnel.  This is disappointing and discouraging news but really, is anyone surprised by this?  Turning thousands of bureaucrats and Haliburton wanna-be’s loose in a largely 16^th century country with pallets of cash and telling them, “Here, fix this place.  Make sure there’s plenty of parking…” is an endeavor doomed to failure from the start.  The government is reported to have handed out 140 billion dollars in no-bid contracts in 2010 alone.  So a chaotic country at war with itself, whose main export is opium poppies, and which is run by smiling bands of criminals and thugs, is suddenly supposed to be able to operate a 300 million dollar power plant when they have trouble getting the goats to march single file into the pen at night – what incredible nincompoop thought that was a good idea?  Shit, if you could put a switch by the door that they could flip on the way out it might work but if it’s any more complicated than lighting the boiler in the basement, forget it.  You might want to build a school first.  And oh by the way; in a country run by a pack of thieves, who thought that the first thing they’d want us to build would be a 40 million dollar prison? 

Ironically, this report is coming to light just as Dick “The King’s Regent” Cheney has emerged blinking and muttering from under whatever safe and secure undisclosed rock he’s been under for the last couple of years with a garbled and self-serving memoir full of gaping narrative holes in the best tradition of political apology and blame casting and which mysteriously skips over his chicken hawk draft dodging, hapless assistance to G.H.W. Bush as defense secretary and graft and corruption infused tenure at the afore mentioned Haliburton and goes right to his heroic service and the rightness of his every thought.   OK, Dick, it’s safe to turn off the light now and go back to wherever your medicine is kept. 

And finally, a strategy memo sent to his loyal troops by official court jester Eric Cantor goes a long way towards a not-so-subtle explanation of the tenor of the political debate going forward into next year and it is a foul and swill besmirched document that reeks of the corporatocracy that is currently pulling the strings of the republican party.  While the bible toting wing of the party is doing parlor tricks to keep everyone’s eyes occupied, the corporate slime wing of the party is continuing it’s all out obsessive assault on the Obama administration.  

While Mitt “Am I president yet?” Romney slinks along trying to keep his head down, the nut cases in the republican field get all the headlines with wild-eyed rants about taking back the country and living a godly life and all manner of other distracting rhetoric, including the mantra of “No tax increase for job creators”.  Meanwhile the erstwhile job creators patiently sit on vaults full of cash, not creating jobs while sponsoring eager ring-wing youth like Cantor and Bachman to call for dismantling the “job-killing” EPA so that they are free to foul their own nest to their hearts content as long as it pays the shareholders what they need and they get to go to Paris for a month every spring.   Eric as much as said their goal as a party is to remove “regulatory impediments” to economic growth, a philosophy that sounds ominously like the type of decisions made just before the Deepwater Horizon exploded. 

“By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers," Cantor said in his memo.

This is, of course, transparent bullshit meant to turn the desperate working class unemployed into foot soldiers to turn out Obama in a year and a half and return the rightful king to the throne.  But watch out, Mitt – as Shakespear said,  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  He might have added, it’s really tough on the hair…

How I spent my summer vacation...

I should have know that if I took a couple of days off to run up to Lake Tahoe and do a little paddling I would come back to a surging wave of laughable, ridiculous hyperbole and political doubletalk and, sure enough; I was right and then some.   It’s a little overwhelming to try to catch up to it all so I’m not going to do that.  After all, how surprising is it really that Michele Bachman wants to get rid of the EPA, Rick “Big Guns” Perry wants to get rid of social security and Ron Paul wants to get rid of FEMA?  Those are all prominent stories I heard today on the way back down to sea level and, as usual, Ron Paul is the only one to make any sense.   FEMA?  Katrina, and that's all there is to that.

I don’t have a working TV at the cabin – something has knocked the cable out - and ironically the single channel I did get was The Weather Channel.  So while it was mid-80’s beautiful where we were, I got to watch the multicolored swirls of hurricane Irene sweeping over the east coast over and over again, along with various weather guys inexplicably standing out in torrential rain telling us it was stormy and raining unusually hard.   This is a standard practice among weather people.  For some reason they feel that when they say it is raining really hard we are so stupid that they need to show us what that means.  Jill, the weather girl, standing outside with her hair blowing horizontally, struggling to tell Steve, the anchorman, that, boy it is really blowing out here.   Got it. 

When the first winter snow falls in the Sierras it is guaranteed that all of the local news truck will hightail it up to Blue Canyon, typically the first place you hit snow driving up from the Bay Area, so that they can set up their forest of antennae and all report back to us that, “We’re here in Blue Canyon where, as you can see, it is snowing like a son of a bitch, I am freezing my ass off and my hair gel is frozen.  Now back to you, Dick…”  Anyway, as interesting as the hurricane was, I think the coverage was just a little bit overhyped, being as it was hitting the New York – Boston – Philly triangle rather than Puerto Rico or Bangladesh. 

I also heard that Pat Robertson thinks that the earth quake back there that cracked the Washington Monument was god’s way of telling us he was on his way back soon, a portentous bit of news for gay couples, teachers of evolution, and devil worshiping secularists everywhere.

But the funniest tidbit I heard today was about the chorus of analysts and political talking heads taking pot shots at Obama for his choice of summer reading while he was hanging out on Martha’s Vineyard.  It’s unimaginable to me that supposedly serious media types would spend more than 5 minutes thinking about this, as if by him choosing to read Cutting for Stone he might as well be reading Archie comics and is therefore unworthy of the long tradition of presidents with giant intellects and a sign that he isn't up to the job.  What made me laugh out loud, though, was when they compared it to George Bush’s vacation reading list from 2006: biographies of Chairman Mao, Robert J. Oppenheimer, Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II and Babe Ruth, not to mention Camus’ The Stranger, a history of polio and – wait for it – MacBeth.   This is so completely hilarious; first, that his PR people would seriously propose that as his summer reading list while he’s on the ranch in Crawford for a couple of weeks.   I mean, come on; George Bush reading Camus and MacBeth?  Seriously…?  This is a man who struggled to get through My Pet Goat.  If that book hadn't had pictures he’d still be trying to read it.  And second, picturing him sitting around the ranch in the evening…

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be

What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it.

“Laura, what the fuck is he trying to say?  Is this English?”  

Funnier still is that Michele Bachman, who is a malapropism waiting to happen, says that her beach reading “is Van Mises” a19^th century economist and social commentator famous for his disdain for socialism.  Sure, Michele, I can picture you on the beach reading this: “Therefore, socialist waste of capital goods is as chronic as the incentives for production and retention of capital are low, while capital goods are coercively monopolised by a dysfunctional State operating with only the data pertaining to interpersonal comparisons of utility, as per democratic production” Yeah, and, "Marcus, could you put some more lotion on my back; I’m just getting to the good part.”   

I say if Obama wants to forget the hellish and unforgiving 4 years he’s going through right now, give it to him.  As it stands right now he will be remembered as a good man trying to do the right thing and failing or as a socialist negro fuck-up, also failing depending on your point of view.  Maybe it’s time to do like JFK and bust out the Ian Fleming.

You gotta fight...for your right...to (a third) paaaaarrrrrrty...

Ever since the debt ceiling “debate” ended in a sickening thud, with Obama negotiating his way to full blown surrender, and the republican campaign had its semi-official kick-off in the corn maze of the Iowa straw poll, the idea of a third party candidate has been rattling around in my head and recent events seem to point to that as a real possibility.  As numerous third party candidates have shown over the years, it’s a nearly impossible road to the White House.  But it looks tantalizingly favorable as we wind into the 4^th quarter of what has been an unmitigated disaster of a year for democrats and a year that the republican party, for all its heavy handed obstructionism and mad-hatter tea party distractions, has been unable to produce a single candidate who looks electable.

Flavor of the month, Rick ”I jog with a 6-shooter” Perry, given an opening you could invade Mexico through, has energized the biblical and socially retarded wing of the party but the old testament morality that is superficially underpinning his campaign could well be his undoing, especially when it is compared to the double dealing cronyism and borderline fraud being exposed on a daily basis as the source of his success in Texas.  I’m thinking that voters – even those completely blinded by the light of their own spiritual incoherence – can smell a rat when the same guy who is praying through crocodile tears in the national limelight one day is stacking bags of cash in the basement like a lone star Mohamar Khadafi  and selling out to the highest bidder like a Dallas call girl. 

Michele Bachman – the Red Queen to Rick’s Mad Hatter – appeals to the tea party rabble and almost no one else, making her about as electable as Newt Gingrich.  All you have to do is picture her as the first woman in American history to be elected president and the dizziness sets in immediately.   Running neck & neck with Perry, Mitt “Doesn’t my hair look good from this angle” Romney has a chance but he has to win the nomination first, a conundrum in that, to win the nomination he has to act crazy enough to draw some support from the Joshua, Judges, Ruth voters but not so crazy as the three piece suits on Wall Street get nervous and start looking around for someone else to carry their water.  It’s tricky business and after hearing Mitt practically swallow his tongue trying to think fast enough to counter a heckler, ( "Yeah, well...well...corporations are people too you know, buddy..."), I’m not sure he’s up to it. 

That assessment leads to the source of my suspicions, Jon Huntsman.  Huntsman has seemed to have consciously decided that he was standing a little too close to the hell fire and brimstone and couldn’t keep a straight face when Perry started babbling about how he has doubts about the theory of evolution and giving extraordinary credence to that one scientist who can’t find his way out of his basement lab but nonetheless has plenty of evidence that there is no such thing as climate change.  Huntsman has taken the sensible yet dangerous position that those shibboleths of party orthodoxy might be suspect and sounding altogether too rational and sensible to really factor in to the actual republican primaries.  But positioned between a severely wounded Obama who’s getting some of the all time worst advice from somebody over there and a nut-case hollow candidate on the right like Perry, he’s starting to look like a reasonable, adult choice to many frustrated democrats, traditional republicans and – most importantly – the majority of voters who call themselves independent.

This is where the current political structure of the country – one that has been badly in need of an overhaul for 30 years – gets in the way.  There is no one party currently whose tent is the right configuration to house a Huntsman candidacy.  He’s not Libertarian enough nor Green enough nor Peace & Freedom enough to sit well in the existing structure of any of the usual third party suspects.   And the way the electoral college is set up, it’s almost impossible for a third party candidate to do anything other act as a spoiler, a la Ross Perot or Ralph Nader.  A spoiler third party candidate could tip the election either way, depending on whether or not he could actually win any states and hence garner any electoral votes or just draw popular votes away from one or the other candidate.  This is what Perot did in 1992, likely leading to Bill Clinton being elected over the incumbent, G.H.W. Bush, don of the infamous Bush Family criminal cabal, and erstwhile preppy bad ass.

But all that aside, I think I would like to see someone run and run well, because I think it’s high time both parties get a swift kick in the ass from voters who are sick of all the blather and bullshit and a level of political discourse more in keeping with a kindergarten lunch room than a mature nation and ostensible leader of the free world.   Let’s call it a profound and timely paradigm shift  - Jon, are you up to it?