"Christ you know it ain't easy...you know how hard it can be...the way things are goin'..."

Charlie Rose recently interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, author of the book, The Price of Civilization, in which he posits that, for the last 30 years or so our over-heated consumer culture combined with the rise of globalization and its concomitant loss of jobs long held by uneducated but hard working men and women, has caused us to come apart at the seams and abandon the whole notion of one nation under god, that requires us to all pitch in and share the burdens of growing our economy and seeing to our mutual prosperity.   Our political parties are unwilling to ask us to face the truth and furthermore, in the case of the republicans, are actively engaged in maintaining the continuing the fictional narrative that has the America we knew and loved ruined by waves of non-white immigrants, wasteful and underhanded politicians, excessive taxation and a “wimpification” of our culture, personified by gay marriage, nanny state welfare, and tree hugging with our pants down.  

Our biggest failure – and one that the neither party is willing confront – is not adapting to the new global economic reality.  Things have changed in a deep and profound way and yet the Obama and the democrats just keep changing the band aid and the republicans’ answer is to lower taxes on the wealthy.   Nobody has the balls to come out and say that many of the lost jobs will never come back, that it might take 5 to 10 years to turn things around and we need to have higher taxes – yes, I said higher taxes – if we are going to pay for all the things that we value as a nation. 

Republicans – and the tea party rabble in particular – propose that the only thing government should pay for is a defense establishment, (and maybe hookers and vodka), and the democrats are too drunk on campaign contributions to cobble together a big picture narrative to oppose that view.  If we continue down this path we are in for a brutal decade.

Mitch McConnell gave a speech today on the senate floor, once again dissembling like a madman, lying and distorting and misrepresenting everything in his hyper-partisan path.   This guy is so slimy you should throw salt on him to make him go away.   He accused Obama of seeking “partisan tax hikes fourteen months before an election”, the poor innocent waif, and said those tax hikes “won’t create one single job”.  Funny, but he and John Boner and the rest of the republican intelligencia seem to think that the tax cuts they want, 14 months before an election, will create lots and lots of jobs.  Either that or they don’t give a shit about jobs, since their corporate masters have been shipping jobs overseas for the last ten years in the name of globalization.  

They talk about globalization as if corporations are so altruistic and open minded and willing to embrace their fellow man, when in reality if they weren’t raking in money from moving operations off shore they would be rinsing and spitting after even saying the word, overseas.  But since the piles of cash they are sitting on comes in large part from operations and customers overseas, they aren’t particularly concerned about doing anything or sacrificing anything to create jobs here.  Why should they bother?  There is a crisis in our culture, in which an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace, in a ferocious quest for wealth, now suffers shortfalls of social trust, honesty, and compassion.  The quest for wealth has turned us against each other and allowed the republican party that is in bed with the wealthiest among us to seem as if they are trying to help the striving citizens achieve their dream.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Rupert Murdoch was also interviewed recently and among the usual self serving gibberish he spewed, he admitted that the only reason he hired Sarah Palin was that “she was hot and got ratings”.  In other words, he couldn’t care less about what she said – she never speaks in complete sentences or has any idea what she’s talking about anyway.   He only wanted her in his stable of idiots because it would make him money, the same reason he has Bill “Pinhead” O’Reilly and Sean “Obama is from Mars” Hannity.  This flies in the face of the opinion of tea party kingmaker and grand high exalted pooh bah Jim DeMint, who has decided, after having a few glasses of absinth, that Palin is as important a figure in modern American politics as Ronald Reagan.  Now we can argue about that point – to me Reagan has always been that amiable dunce described by Clark Clifford - but there is no denying his impact on the American political landscape.  It’s like he was an asteroid sucked out of its orbit that landed in the heartland and the crater is still smoldering.  Palin, on the other hand, hit the scene like some two-drink minimum pole dancer who was plucked from obscurity to run for Hockey Queen.  

What is striking about the jockeying for position going on by the republican candidates is this; we now have no Palin and no Chris Christie.  We have Ron Paul continuing to be marginalized, (that’s crazy Ron…wink, wink), a fistful of also-rans in Santorum, Gingrich, Cain and Bachman, and what seem to the chosen ones – Romney and Perry.  Does any right thinking republican strategist think they have a winner in that group?   It certainly appears that Romney has the best chance and also appears that Perry is being abandoned – when Faux News starts dissing you and Michele Bachman feels free to start speaking in tongues about your well known cronyism in Texas, you have a problem.  So what is the end game?  Are these guys the best they can do?  Or is it that the country is so fucked up that no sober republican wants to be put in charge? 

Thomas Friedman recently was quoted talking about the time being right for a third party candidate and I am feeling like that might be the best way out.  I put an Obama bumper sticker on my car the other day and was flipped off three times within 2 hours, an admittedly unscientific way to assess his chances but it made me deeply uneasy.  I think he is a good man – certainly much better than the rag-tag clown posse opposing him – but he is getting bad advice from all sides and may not have the vision necessary to run this country right now as it lurches around dangerously like a rhino that just woke up after an all-night bender at the water hole, (goddamn gazelles are crazy, man...).  In the last couple of weeks it seems that maybe somebody close to him got his ear and said, Hey Barack; the ship is going down.  It time to stop bailing and get the hell off and move the flag somewhere else to fight another day.   I think he wants to do the right thing but at this point, the right thing is going to be really hard to do.  Maybe if Bachman and Perry pray for him…