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…