It’s Thanksgiving week and so the clock is ticking down, leaving little time for the Justice League of America to…wait, I mean, the Super Committee, to craft a miraculous solution to the issue of the ongoing budget deficit, thus causing the earth to be torn asunder…er… I mean causing automatic across the board cuts to go into effect, (in over a year), and raising a major shit-storm from sea to shining sea. Media types and the punditocracy are particularly worked up about this and will likely be frothing at the mouth and having convulsions by Friday of this week.
Like the trumped up issue of the debt ceiling itself this summer, this is a solution searching desperately for a problem. Once John Boner was unable to convince his unruly army of god-fearing anti-tax zealots that the deal he had coerced out of Obama was more than they could have reasonable hoped for, the fix was in and no semi-imaginary Super Committee of republicans and democrats was every going to be able to bridge the gaping crevasse separating them. This was a politically convenient fiction providing temporary cover for both sides while the republicans tried in vain to winnow the ridiculous herd of candidates and Obama and the democrats feverishly tried to figure out how to get people to like them.
Regardless of the public angst, this is another non-issue and only serves to distract people from far more important things, like ending the wars, cutting the defense budget, and getting money out of politics. I know; that ship has largely sailed and it may be naïve. But there was an article on The Huffington Post recently about how 15 freshmen members of the house have raked in millions of dollars this year from corporations allowed to be treated like people and from shadowy PAC’s who don’t answer to anyone headed by whores like Eric Cantor running around the country doing essentially nothing but collecting contributions to his PAC and promising sleeve jobs to anyone giving him $500 buck. Hey, Eric, if you just let the Bush tax cuts expire the deficit disappears in 5 years.
This brings me back to Newt, the historian. In typical Newtonian over-the-top fashion, he blasted Obama at the same time he was not so subtly blowing his own horn, spouting off that, rather than being a liability as some suggest, his intimate knowledge of Washington would be valuable because “we tried amateur ignorance and it hasn’t worked out too well”, or words to that effect. Gingrich’s “amateur ignorance” comment is particularly ironic as he both promotes his working knowledge of how Washington functions at the same time as he touts his outsider credentials, (code for his being smarter than everyone else in the district), and then insists that he has never been a lobbyist. The inconsistency of these positions doesn’t seem to bother him and the short term memory loss of republican primary voters facilitates this nicely. But anyone paying attention knows that this guy is for sale to the highest bidder and that’s not a particularly attractive quality in a president. Even Peggy Noonan called him out this morning.
George Will scoffed at the notion that Newt was hired by anyone to be a historian, much less by Freddie Mac, who needs the puffed up pseudo-academic blather of an out-of-work historian like a fish needs a bicycle. It is kind of funny to hear Will accuse Newt Gingrich – or anyone – of “absurd rhetorical grandiosity”. This from a man who defines semantic masturbation and loves the sound of his own voice more than anyone in modern political life. But it is telling. For Gingrich, when the majority of the republican punditry turns on you, you have a problem, whether you are the flavor of the month or not.
Mitt Romney, the one candidate who is unapologetically all about the Benjamins, continued to play rope-a-dope on the issues while 6 of his rivals sat around a table singing kum ba yah, each trying to out-emote the others while sharing their personal relationship with Jesus. It’s not entirely clear why this is so important in a secular country but they all seem to feel it is. Romney is a guy who looks more and more as if he has George Bush syndrome – he wants like hell to be president but doesn’t seem to have a clue why or what he would do if he were actually elected. Maybe just getting the nomination would give he enough of a woody that he wouldn’t have to actually win to get off. But when you come down to it, he’s a guy who has made a living for over 25 years screwing people in the name of improving efficiency and productivity, sort of like Stalin did. You know, dig more coal or no gruel for you. Bain Capital probably took away more jobs in its normal course of business than Mitt every “created” as governor of Massachusetts. That’s what they do. That’s what they are good at. He is an uber capitalist Randian who is running at the behest of and with the permission of big business interests because he’s one of them.
I’d like to suggest to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, if they’re awake, and to you too, Barack; stop kissing the asses of the party that wants nothing more than to see you fail. Tell them to suck on it when they want to talk about the deficit, and go to work overturning the Citizens United decision; the most damaging Supreme Court decision of the last 50 years. That would be doing something.
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