Cynical Irony and disingenuous pandering, thy name is Mitt…

I was driving home recently listening to NPR when a story came on detailing the latest attempt to attack Obama by Mitt Romney out on the stump and I almost spit Diet Pepsi all over my dashboard.   Here was Mitt Romney, candidate of a republican party which has de-funding of government on all levels as its main operational principle and which has gone to court to fight bilingual education all over the country, speaking to a group of Hispanic small business owners and claiming that education reform as designed and prescribed by him is suddenly the most important issue of our time.   It’s laughable to watch Mitt stumble around trying to find an opening so he can land that one knock-out punch.  And since nothing else he or the Koch Brothers or Karl Rove or any of their congressional minions have tried has gotten any traction, Mitt trots out faux concern for education and hope that somehow we can ignore his imperious and patrician background long enough for it to stick.

Moreover, he had the gall to flat out accuse Obama of putting campaign donations from the teachers’ unions ahead of improving education and to blame him for the state of education today when John Boner and the rest of the unruly and bug-eyed rabble in the House of Representatives are starving local and state governments of funding, causing a catastrophic reduction in the number of teachers available to educate the children he pretends to care about so deeply.  He makes me want to puke.

This is the guy who has a schizoid immigration policy in a party that is certainly not known for being sympathetic to the Hispanic community, shedding big fat, toxic crocodile tears about the sad state of minority education.  His party is almost universally contemptuous of the public school system and yet he promises these Hispanic business people that he would lead the charge to make certain that their children get the education they deserve.  Meanwhile he is proposing and supporting an economic agenda – designed by weasely wunderkind Paul Ryan - that would cut public funding for schools – and virtually everything else - and turn it over to “for-profit” educational companies, meaning that the very minority children with whom he is pretending to empathize won’t be able to afford his grand private education and will be stuck with underfunded, crippled public schools of last resort.   Who can believe this guy about anything?

The republicans to try to pretend that they are concerned about education but that concern only runs deep enough to include cutting teacher salaries – directly or indirectly – and starving public schools by slashing the Federal budget’s aid to state governments.  Much of that aid is directed to education at the state level and the deficit boogie-man haunting republican dreams is resulting in unprecedented chaos most clearly manifested in the state of American education.  They have made public employee unions – and the teacher’s union specifically – the enemy and the targeted example of corruption, complacency, mismanagement, laziness, incompetence, sexual depravity and bad personal hygiene.   They would prefer to either send their kids to private schools like Mitt himself if they’re wealthy enough or home school them if they’re delusional, fanatic and socially terrified enough.  

Schools – like much of government – have significant waste and disorganization that should be addressed.  There needs to be a way to get the almost comically incompetent teachers drunk on tenure out of the classroom and into retirement or another line of work.   There needs to be a way to get parents engaged in the process of educating their own children and make them understand that sending their children to school isn’t the same as taking your car in for service.  Overlapping responsibilities, unnecessary layers of management and tenure combined with non-English-speaking students conspire to make modern education less than ideal.  But the only solution you achieve by yanking the ventilator off the struggling patient is to kill them – not a great outcome unless you just don’t give a shit and are sick of paying the electric bill to run the thing. 

Romney hasn’t bothered to lay out his brilliant plan to resolve these issues and empty promises are the order of the day in political campaigns but the idea that he is going to portray himself as the last great hope for education is hilariously incompatible with reality. 

Blame Obama for having a jack-booted justice department that is focused on all the wrong things, blame him for being a little bit timid and underfunding the stimulus program, blame him for spending the first two years of his term trying to be the level-headed community organizer pleasing everyone instead of using the bully pulpit to kick ass and take names and get things done.  I think he made a mistake spending so much political capital on health care even if it will turn out to be a signature achievement.   But to blame him for the state of education in an age of a dumbed down, discouraged and angry population and schools starved for funds, all the while pretending to have the answer is Romney being a cyborg gas-bag who truly believes nothing but who will say anything to try to be president.   That really is who he is…

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son..." - thoughts on the Obesity Epidemic in America

I heard a report recently that well over one-third of the adults in the United States are obese and that number is climbing rapidly with no end in sight.  Twenty percent of children are obese.   My first thought on hearing this, was, “What the hell is wrong with us?”   Twelve states have obesity rates over 30% - in the year 2000, none were that high.  How in the world have we let this happen?  It’s inexplicable, as if 40% of adults were still smoking.   But obesity will kill you just as surely as smoking will and maybe more.   Relentless and mostly government ordained education about smoking has resulted in the number of smokers in the adult population being cut in half since the 50’s.  Maybe that will happen with obesity too.  But being fat is so obviously a bad thing that it still begs the question; why is this happening?

My own opinion – ungrounded and pure speculation – is that modern life has become so complex, and the volume and velocity of information so completely overwhelming, that average people trying to confront those complexities just shut down.  They resort to the simple things in life, the things that are cognitively economical and physically rewarding.  They eat, they shop, they grab on to a religious belief like grim death, they work, if they can, and they go to bed at night exhausted, dazed and satiated.  When they get up in the morning, the world is still the same fucked up place and their life is still careening out of control.  But eating feels good, especially sugary, fat-loaded clusters of empty calories, so they eat their way through a day that is filled with blasts of random and non-stop information, a thousand decisions that amount to nothing, a shitty job – if they have a job – and emotional whiplash at every turn.

Then they turn on the TV and see Orwellian political gibberish coming out of multiple media outlets whose own 24 hour new imperative demands that they “update” and report every garbled utterance of the professional political class to these weary souls all day every day.   What do they understand and believe?  What do they take to be real?  Who do they believe?   I say they eat a big greasy cheeseburger of simple political thought and wash it down with a 40 ounce Big Gulp of comforting nonsense they want to hear and finish it with a few doughnuts of scantily disguised hate speech and racism.  Bob’s yer uncle, they’re as mentally obese as they are physically.

It doesn’t help that news outlets beat to death anything that remotely seems like news.   For evidence, take stock of the coverage of Obama stating the obvious; that he is in favor of gay marriage.  I mean, c’mon; who is surprised by this?  No one.  Is it surprising that he said it without equivocating or detailing a dozen caveats?  Yeah, probably.  Since no politician does something like this without carefully doing the math as to what it means, you can bet that the Obama camp thinks it helps more than it hurts and it was pretty clear anyway from the man’s overall policies that this would inevitably be the end game. 

But now that he’s being criticized by everyone from Romney – who can’t seem to quite decide how he wants to frame the criticism – to goof-ball Howard Stern to Rush Blowhard to Meagan McCain to Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, it is THE story everywhere you turn.   Somewhere some overweight dimwit is probably having a second cheeseburger just because he’s so upset about the whole story and trying to reconcile his own confused feelings for that tall guy who stocks shelves at the drug store.  Is there anyone who was going to vote for Obama who now isn’t?  Maybe, though for the life of me I couldn’t describe them to you.   It seems to me far more likely that progressive independents who were considering sitting it out in disappointed protest now feel like maybe he has enough balls to vote for after all.  I know it made me happy for that very reason.  It’s as if he finally said, “Fuck you back-ass mouth breathers.  This is right and that’s what I think.  Let’s move on to something important.” 

 Of course there may have been a whole bunch of his campaign geniuses who peed themselves when he said it but they were largely an overly timid bunch of pussys  anyway.   

But back to the central thesis of this post – and there is one: when potential voters, who have mentally shut down and refuse to process anything more complex than who should get thrown off Dancing with the Stars, hear the garbled rants and bug-eyed screeds that Romney has been frantically tossing off for the last two weeks, it’s, "Honey, get me another plate of ribs and mashed potatoes." 

He takes credit for the resurgence of the US auto industry after being boldly and with great certainty on record as saying they should all go bankrupt and that would fix what ailed them.  It takes guts to try to pull that off but he’s counting on that guy on his couch with the TV tray believing him just because he’s so god damned earnest about it.   He totally sounds like he believes himself when he excoriates Obama for his tragic mishandling of the concerns of small business, evoking the magic voo doo doll of Jimmy Carter to measure the extent of Obama’s failure.

I’m sure couch guy doesn’t think twice when the republicans propose a defense budget larded with even more unnecessary shit than the Pentagon wants and say it’s absolutely critical to build a missile defense capability on the US east coast in case the Iranians somehow overnight roll out some nukes that could reach that far before the Israelis bomb them into oblivion.

I’m sure he’s bedazzled by the reptilian charm of Paul Ryan and his “let-them-eat-cake” budget and believes that if we just kill more poor people and give rich people more money he can get off his couch and head to Wal-Mart with a full wallet and a shopping list two feet long. 

To me, the same I-don’t-give-a-shit-anymore attitude that turns ordinary people into heart attack prone diabetics gives license to the Super PACs to spew their toxic swill with impunity too.  And you don’t have to be Ivan Pavlov or even Karl Rove to know that endlessly repeated lies become the truth if for no other reason than ubiquity to a certain portion of the population.   How has our country come to this?  How did the ferocious hatred for “the other” become institutionalized?  I wish I knew.  For now, I’m need to go out and get some chicken wings…

Half truths and savage lies: the republican presidential campaign begins in earnest...

A veritable conga line of prominent right-wing national political figures has formed up behind Mitt Romney in the last couple of weeks after Rick Santorum ended his fervent but misguided run for the nomination, leaving only crazy Uncle Ron Paul and delusional blowhard, Newt Gingrich as Mitt’s foils.  And Newt finally threw in the towel today, albeit with an incredibly lukewarm endorsement of Romney and an unrepentantly over the top hyper-partisan blast at Obama.  But the writing is writ large on the subway walls so there is no longer anything to be gained by withholding support, no matter how queasy Mitt makes them.  Lo, suddenly the ghost of Ronald Ray-Guns walks beside him and he has clothed himself in the blue blazer of wealth, privilege, power and an utter cluelessness regarding the day to day life of most of the Americans he purports to want to lead.   How is it that the republican nominees seem congenitally incapable of forming lucid thoughts when speaking extemporaneously?  (Rhetorical question)

He has spent the last couple of weeks hammering Obama on everything from foreign policy to taxes, the deficit, his regulatory and environmental policy and even his choice of associates when he was in college, in a clearly desperate attempt to get some traction from a voting public which mostly doesn’t like him much.  Give the public credit; they usually have a pretty good bullshit detector.  Mitt’s flip-flopping gibberish on the stump sounds like nothing more than a guy hoping against hope that short attention spans and millions of dollars in negative advertising will help him carry the day come November, particularly if his treacherous co-conspirators, John Boner, grim millionaire Mitch McConnell, unprincipled donation slut, Eric Cantor and shifty eyed ferret, Paul Ryan succeed in obstructing every attempt to continue the economic recovery and crater the economy by September.  If they can’t, Mitt and Ann should load the Cadillacs with cheap liquor and head for The Hamptons by Labor Day. 

One of the biggest challenges facing Mitt and his merry band of supply-side zealots and deficit alarmists is that their deficit cutting austerity agenda is taking a beating globally, particularly in Europe.  Germany and France continue to hold out for an extension of these policies in spite of the building evidence that they are not working and are in fact exacerbating the down turn because they are not fostering employment growth, something everyone agrees is crucial.  Most of the balance of the EU is going through a serious re-thinking of the idea of government cuts being the answer.   In America, more and more economists are weighing in in favor of more government spending, not less, as the answer to the continued economic doldrums in which we still find ourselves drifting in spite of Obama’s efforts to put some wind behind our sails.   

This fundamental argument is the central battle ground for the next 6 months, and perhaps it should be.  But the election is about more than this simple – though important – argument.   Obama will probably win or lose based on the economy even though his every attempt to do anything to fix it has been systematically sabotaged since November of 2010 to an extent that borders on treason.   Defying all previous protocol and notions of collegial cooperation – the kind of thing that used to be routine – the entire republican political apparatus has worked tirelessly to ensure nothing so much as Obama’s loss in November of 2012.  It remains to be seen if this cynical ploy to manipulate low information voters and exploit feelings of helplessness and fear succeeds.   Lord knows they will never stop trying.  They have been blocking a bill to provide transportation funds for infrastructure that has historically had broad bi-partisan support and would go a long way toward reducing the 17% unemployment rate among construction workers in the country.   The imaginary boogie-man of the deficit combined with undercutting Obama at every turn trumps every other impulse.

So let’s just add up the evidence and see which vision of America we prefer, shall we?

The republicans don’t want to pay for health care for women, the poor or the elderly, they don’t want to pay for education, they don’t want to pay for the EPA or any kind of environmental protection that gets in the way of unrelenting exploitation of resources, they don’t want to pay for research and development unless it is in the interest of oil companies, they didn’t want to pay for the auto industry bail out, they’re against everything that Obama and the democrats propose, they seem to be indiscriminately against immigrants – even those here legally, they are against any kind of financial reform to protect us against the Wall Street swine who precipitated the crash and great recession,  they seem to all be against the idea of the TARP program but all of them have benefited from donations from those companies who received the TARP funds, they are against FNMA and FHLMC, school lunch programs, anti-drug education programs, virtually any regulation that impacts profits, they’re against gay and lesbian rights and are seeking to disenfranchise large blocks of voters who typically vote as democrats, they’re against unions and any kind of worker protection, such as OSHA.  They are also against any kind of respectful negotiations with our enemies or those with whom we disagree.

They are for more military spending and lower taxes for the top 5% of income earners, including lower corporate taxes and lower capital gains taxes.  They are for hating Obama. 

 In sum, this doesn’t seem particularly patriotic to me.  In the past the opposition party would cooperate with a president – for the most part – and let him succeed or fail on the merits of his idea and – more importantly – the results.  But you can’t hit the ball if you don’t swing, as my dad used to say.  If Obama’s proposals are never allowed to succeed or fail this, in itself, accomplishes much for the republican party, as the continued unemployment and misery makes already angry voters even more restive and give cockamamie ideas like the Ryan budget some legitimacy, if only because pissed off voters who are desperate will be willing to try anything other than the status quo.  The repugnant Citizens United decision is allowing the porcine Karl Rove and the Koch brothers to anonymously flood the airwaves with twisted swill and toxic and horrifying tales of Obama's socialist agenda whether it has any relation to the truth or not. 

I’m not Obama’s biggest fan; far from it.  But a duly elected president deserves to be judged on the results of his policies as a whole, not some truncated version that was fought bitterly and sabotaged every step of the way.   For that level of duplicity alone, these jackals deserve to be sent packing…