The last, worst fear of the Ruling Class; Mitt gives a speech for the new American Century

Watching  the refrigerator-white circus that is the republican convention this week and listening to the various speeches I’ve been struck by one underlying theme; I’ll call it “other-ness”.   Much of the rhetoric of the party is based on this notion of “the other”, whether in fear or revulsion or contempt.  For that matter, the modern republican party – and it’s mentally dull cousin, the tea party – have little else to offer of any substance.

Have either Paul Ryan or Romney offered a detailed version of their budget plans?  For all his wonder-boy veneer, Ryan has left gaping holes in his plan in terms of the loathsome and grim details of spending cuts and tax reform.  The dullards in the party care only that his budget cuts out “those other people”, with whom they share no particular affinity; who, as a matter of practical policy reality, they deem to be less American than they themselves and who therefore deserve to get nothing and like it.  They’re isolated, frightened, cornered by events so far beyond their control as to be incomprehensible and they’re not feeling particularly generous.

These feelings play right into the republican mythology – the things the party used to stand for -  of self reliance, hard work for a day’s pay and – lest we forget – a legacy of divisive racial exploitation, bigotry and the white man’s manifest destiny.   To the simple minded, the personification of 50 years of coddling “the others” has been made manifest in Barack Obama, a black man with a Muslim name.  And the ruthlessness with which the old-money power brokers of a minority party have wielded this abject fear has been breathtaking to behold.

Take a step back for a moment and examine the republican bogeyman of the last 18 months; the deficit.  As a practical matter, it’s something of very little consequence to most average American voters – too esoteric, really, for it to be tangible.   The party’s pinning Obama with this make-believe crisis gives them a perfect justification for the cuts to the social safety net they’ve long sought and which their ignorant tribe is all too willing to see them undertake.   But the beauty of this strategy is that, to the extent that there is a crisis, it’s one primarily the result of the policies of eight chaotic years of republicans running wild; a drastic explosion of the cost of two wars accompanied by a tax cut for the ruling class collided with a once-in-a-generation financial storm that blew over the house of cards economy created by 25 years of republican de-regulation and laissez faire capitalism.   Presto! One hell of a deficit in eight short years and a shitstorm to deal with as George the Dim retreated to the relative safety of his pseudo-ranch in Crawford.  

To clean up this unprecedented mess Obama had no choice but to throw money at the economy.  His success has been muted by the sheer size of Bush’s fuck-up and the traitorous behavior of the petulant republicans after having their party ruined by an upstart leading an enormously popular revolt.   His attempt to keep the economy afloat has been magically transformed by the opposition into a careless and ill-conceived give away to the undeserving – to “them”.  Not to real Americans - to illegal immigrants and the poor and – ironically – to working class, blue collar union workers in the form of the auto industry bail out for which he is inexplicably chastised even today. 

Somehow the republicans have succeeded in making the country more polarized than I remember, even in the madness of 1968. 

Condi Rice – token woman, African-American and West Coast elitist intellectual – gave a speech brandishing her Reagan legacy and credentials and it was just another sad attempt to demonize “the other”.   Those people who would…I don’t know exactly – do things we don’t like?  The nebulous enemy we are endlessly fighting, the forces in the world that won’t acquiesce to our wishes to have our way – even in a noble cause – because they have things they want too. 

In what passed for a foreign policy speech this summer, Romney said, "I am an unapologetic believer in the greatness of this country.  I’m not ashamed of American power.”  Well, Mitt, maybe you should – if not be ashamed – perhaps give some thought to alternative ways of settling vexing issues around the world by some means other than parking the 7^th fleet offshore and scaring the hell out of everyone, US citizens included.  Your foreign policy advisers include almost 20 of the same knucklehead chicken hawks responsible for what is widely considered to be an historically tragic period of American foreign policy, presided over by the reptilian Dick Cheney, a man’s man who is so full of shit he’s already been discarded and ignored as surely as Sarah Palin, and Donald Rumsfeld, who’s exalted sense of righteousness led him to plan for an Iraqi campaign lasting months, where we would be welcomed as heroes. 

Chris Christie, a man who’s foreign policy experience is limited to ordering large quantities of Chinese take-out once a week, also puffed his considerable chest out this week, yearning for Romney’s election and the start of “a new American century”, apparently unaware of how idiotic that sounds to the rest of the world. 

Even the republican embrace of the religious right and the evangelical community can easily be seen for the cynical manipulation that it is; how easy it is for angry and scared people of religious faith to be turned into a hateful rabble who cling to their faith but forget the basic principles that should have drawn them to faith in the first place – contempt for the poor, people of color, different religions, gays and lesbians and anyone not planning for the second coming.   The powerful  guys smoking the good cigars and drinking the expensive scotch don’t give a shit about John 3:14 – they want to be in charge and as long as stoking the worst in their addled minions accomplishes that, they happily play along. 

The country is coming apart at the seams, separating into tribes like some god damn science fiction novel.  Or as Paul Ryan would put it, “the useless class” and the triumphant, self made class, like himself – never a job outside of government - and Mitt, the turkey vulture of the East.  The election may be the last gasp of the barricaded-in-their-homes-scared-shitless goaded into extreme intolerance by modern robber barons, hedge fund whores, oil companies seeing their demise in every Prius on the road and the last dying remnants of the Ruling Class.  The good news is, the “others” will eventually win.  As hard as slimy little vermin like Karl Rove pray alone at night for a republican century, he is far too evil for whoever he’s praying to to listen. 

 But don’t kid yourselves; if Romney wins it’s going to be a grim and frightening time for all of us who aren’t rich or drugged.   It will be as if we didn’t learn a damned thing since 2000 or, if we did, we can’t bring ourselves to uncover our eyes long enough to wake up and make the nightmare stop.   At the end of the day, those who are curled into a ball with the blanket over their heads will only be hiding from the inevitable – we might as well spend the next three months making sure that doesn’t happen. 

Post Racial America, My Ass; Romney's Latest Act of Mad Desperation...

There has started to be a vaguely familiar bad odor clinging to the Romney campaign for the last couple of weeks, you know, like the smell of a neglected cat box the first time you stop over at the apartment of that girl you just met.   Or like when you don’t notice that you stepped in dog shit at your brother’s house and leave your shoes in your garage when you get home.  The next day you wander through the house sniffing and looking puzzled.  As I sniffed the funky vapor trail thoughtfully, I suddenly recognized what it was; desperation and fear.   

How else to explain the complicated pivot the campaign has taken regarding welfare reform.  In a complete non sequitur, in the middle of a trivial pissing match over Mitt’s tax returns, Medicare and the choice of smirking Ayn Rand groupie, Paul Ryan as the party’s vice presidential candidate, suddenly it has become the issue of utmost importance.  There has been an avalanche of ads proclaiming that the Obama administration is trying to remove the work requirement in the program and the campaign has trotted out tried and true boldfaced liars and two bit criminals, like John Sununu, to appear on news outlets everywhere, stridently accusing Obama of acting like the communist Muslim activist he is by letting welfare mothers and other slothful alcoholics and cripples lay around on their sofa all day drinking cheap wine and inhaling paint fumes.

There’s nothing surprising about this as a tactic; baseless accusations repeated over and over to an ignorant base is par for the modern republican course.  What is mildly surprising – and the source of the odor of desperation – is the unabashed racial code providing the subtext to the entire, empty exercise.  And for that – and the mountain of cash required to sustain the assault of noxious media – you can thank treacherous little insect Karl Rove.  And therein lays the key to connecting the dots – let’s give that a try.

As has been pointed out so eloquently by Bernie Sanders, there are 26 billionaires who make up the vast majority of the donors sustaining the republican party, particularly since the lead up to the 2010 mid-term elections.   Orchestrated by Rove, this group of stealthy rich white men has been advancing one of the most reactionary agenda since Barry Goldwater.   But if you’re going to pony up that kind of serious money, you expect to get a pretty good return on investment.  The tragic error Rove made was in the clown-car full of dangerous lunatics, religious fanatics and half-baked knuckleheads who started last year vying for the nomination. 

I’m sure at one point it looked as if Obama was so doomed to failure - due to unfolding events around the world coupled with the obstructionist traitors in congress - that Rove could hold his nose and select a career also-ran like Romney from amongst this bunch and still prevail.  The problem has turned out to be that, in spite of determined efforts by the republicans in congress to establish themselves as the most “do-nothing” group in history, and systematic voter suppression efforts by equally seditious governors across the country, tremendous success in foreign policy and an improving economy have boosted Obama into the lead in the polls coming down the home stretch. 

Now as Romney tries earnestly to project some sort of gravitas by dragging Ryan around the country saying, “Why don’t you take that one, Paul…?”, their tired economic prescription of tax cuts for high income earners and scorched earth social policy have coalesced into a cocktail that no one who’s still sober wants to drink again.  Been there, threw up on that.  So what does a slimy little turd blossom like Rove do?  Why play the race card, of course.  And although the modern republican party has been able to continue to exist as a minority party in the US for the last 40 years through a skillful use of racial politics to attract the increasingly marginalized and angry middle class uneducated white vote, this may be a bridge too far, even for them.

Which brings us back to the dirty campaign regarding welfare - Obama hasn’t advocated dropping the work requirement for welfare recipients; he simply acquiesced to the wishes of a  group of governors – a number of them republican – for some flexibility in how this requirement is implemented and managed.  The Romney people know this full well.  But Rove doesn’t care about niceties like telling the truth – he follows a republican tactic that goes back at least to the Reagan administration and the pack of near criminals employed through that dark and loathsome eight years; if you can’t prove it, I didn’t do it.  And the corollary is, of course, if I say it enough times, it becomes true.  Combine the two approaches and you have the toxic swill now being promulgated by the Romney campaign across the land – accuse the Terrible Negro of trying to help out his shiftless, crack addicted brothers and sisters by making it easier for them to spend all day on the stoop drinking cheap wine out of a paper bag while the angry and hurting white working class has to support them.   It’s so obvious.

But in American today we have an unfortunate confluence of extreme partisanship and ignorance and these low-information, wounded and angry voters can be swayed by the endless repetition of ads, even those universally judged to be false.  And remember; we’re not talking about ads which merely spin an issue in one direction or another – they’re lies, the Romney people know they’re lies and have nonetheless adopted a clear strategy to run them anyway, to get the base fired up going onto their convention in Tampa next week.  This is unprecedented political cynicism and a prescription for an Orwellian, dystopian future that should keep us awake at night.

The main reason that an empty-headed, vacuous candidate like Romney is even close in late August of an election years is that the people who have a vitriolic hatred of Obama are far more enthusiastic in their feelings than those of us who are now disappointed or disaffected by him or who think Joe Biden is an idiot.  It’s demonstrably easier to be filled with righteous indignation in opposition to something than to support something about which you may be somewhat ambivalent.  But really, do you want to live in an America run by a cloistered group of rich white guys who may be prone to god-knows-what level of psychosis and dysfunction?   Do we want the neo-con geniuses responsible for two horribly destructive wars back in the White House playing video games with the live of American soldiers?  Do we want oil companies free to punch holes in the ground everywhere there’s a sniff of oil?  Do we really want to discard a proven 80 year-old social safety net in favor of some quasi-Randian notion of self reliance and laissez-faire capitalism? 

Are we really that afraid of the blurring of racial distinctions that we want to cling to our misty notion of a mostly white America full of June and Ward Cleavers living comfortably on Pine St. with a black maid and Hispanic gardener?   Let’s drag this putrid ad campaign out into the light and discuss it for what it really is; a desperate appeal to fear and the latest evidence that the republican party has sold its soul to the devil and he looks a lot like a chubby little turd blossom from Texas named Rove.

If I could talk to Barack alone for 10 minutes...

In the interest of following the modern empty-headed media trend of bashing both parties and spreading the blame for the current contagion with which we are infected to politicians of all stripes, (even though loyal readers know that I certainly disagree), I am going to flog Team Obama for both their failings through the first term as well as their miserable failure in designing an effective campaign to date.   So off we go; here’s an open letter to Barack Obama and his dizzy and uncoordinated minions.

Dear Barack; Let me start by saying that your election in 2008 was a surprisingly joyous occasion for me.  I’m nearly 60, came of age in the late 60’s hoping like hell that I didn’t get drafted, cursing Nixon, and developing an uncanny ability for rolling joints with one hand while driving, not necessarily in that order.   It made me happy for several reasons; first, it meant that the previous 8 years of an incredibly frightening dimwit wandering near the red telephone with his reptilian prince regent and a cabal of ruthless greed-heads was not the start of an inexorable, flaming spiral of death, fear and madness.  You may not realize just how comforting that was.

 It meant the march of the right wing reactionaries -  begun with the election of the sweating, swarthy, jabbering paranoid Dick Nixon and blossoming with his near-sighted war criminal turned statesman, Henry Kissinger bombing Laos and Cambodia back to the 16^th century while want-to-be secret agent G. Gordon Liddy and his clumsy band of third rate second story men fucked up a simple break in at the Watergate - had been at least temporarily halted by an almost inexplicable surge of mass cooperation, collaboration and wrenching disgust at what our government had become – water-boarding liars and thieves and amoral criminals.  It felt good.

It also meant a lot to me that an intelligent man of color was elected, a truly historic event that my generation had been working towards for nearly 50 years.  It meant that the regressive cavemen like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond had lost, once and for all and finally.  It may be a cliché but in truth, we are living the great American experiment writ large – the stereotypical melting pot is still cooking and we are not nearly done with the inevitable blurring of the races just as surely as we aren’t done with the blurring of gender roles, adjusting to the global economy, and figuring out how to stop from destroying the planet.   You weren’t a rich old white man and that was incredibly refreshing.  And in truth, had you been, with the same rhetoric and policies and vision for governing, you probably wouldn’t have been elected, even running against a fossilized cold warrior like McCain and an empty-headed ditz like Palin. 

Unfortunately for you, this monumentally important event took place in the context of the disastrous culmination of years of misguided economic policy, deregulation, and selfishness and as you slid behind the wheel to an Earth, Wind and Fire soundtrack you probably knew that the brakes were about to go out and the wheels were going to fall off.   A determined conspiracy theorist, as a matter of fact, could easily suspect that the nomination of McCain and his subsequent punch-drunk selection of Palin may have been a signal that the republicans wanted no part of the last four years, knowing full well that it was a catastrophic train wreck waiting to happen and not wanting it to happen on their watch.  That particular bit of insight proved to be true; angry and frightened American started turning on you immediately, expecting you to fix things the day you took office and those not hiding under the bed with a blanket over their heads began muttering darkly in about the summer of 2009. 

But I am not here to defend you – in spite of you having my sympathy, the truth is you have fucked this up a number of ways and there’s no getting around it.

You should have recognized early on that being conciliatory with the republicans was going to get you nowhere.   They began plotting your 2012 defeat the day you were inaugurated and it was clear anything you proposed, they would oppose.   Instead you negotiated and negotiated right up until the 2010 mid-terms when they ate your lunch.  You squandered an historic opportunity by even bothering.

Your justice department has been a nightmare; ignoring the financial criminals completely, chasing pot dispensaries and letting the crew-cut jar heads run amock along the border.   There’s really been almost no difference between Holder running the department and the series of brown shirts and Wall Street collaborators running it for George the Dull.  Holder is no Alberto Gonzales but in truth he hasn’t accomplished much either and chasing illegal aliens and stoned cancer patients is no way to build a lasting legacy.   Meanwhile smirking pricks like Jamie Dimon are testifying in front of congress and pissing on your shoes. 

You promised to end the war in Iraq and you did that; congratulations.  In spite of blow-back from right wing warriors and chicken hawks who never met a war they couldn’t support, we’ve finally ended that doomed adventure in cheap revenge and dick-measuring begun by Dubbya the dumb ass and cheered on by the cadre of neo-con geniuses in the White House basement.  Good job.  Now get us the hell out of godforsaken Afghanistan.   Sure, there were political considerations to doubling down with another surge but face it; Karzai and his tribe of cronies and fixers are just a bunch of thieves and bandits and imagining for one second that we can turn this dusty, goat-ridden place into some kind of exotic resort destination and productive member of international society is a fool’s errand of the highest order and it’s long past time to tell him,  “it’s over – you guys figure it out”. 

One point made repeatedly by republicans and patriotic conservatives – not necessarily the same thing – is that you have missed a chance to root out all of the mind-boggling duplication, waste, inefficiency and just systemic chaos in government.   Have you tried to interface – as a private citizen – with any federal government bureaucracy lately?   It’s a sucking tar pit and a fundamental reason Americans are disillusioned and pissed off about their government.  It’s this monumental “thing” that only seems to restrict us and not actually assist us in accomplishing anything useful.   Under the circumstances, this is probably a second term issue but I thought I’d mention it. 

But my biggest complaint isn’t something you chose to do or not do; honorable people can disagree as to priorities and necessities.  My biggest problem is that your team messaging sucks; it’s absolutely inept.  If this is the best that Axelrod can do, he’s gotta go.   With all that you accomplished – in the face of staggering and treasonous opposition – most of the country still doesn’t know that they got a tax break, thinks of “stimulus” as a dirty obscenity, hates the idea of bailouts but are supporting the opposition, who themselves benefited from them and who – now that they don’t need you any more – are clamouring for your defeat and calling you a failure.   There is no understanding of the economic fundamentals making employment such an intractable problem, even though Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz have been giving free lectures on the topic for two years. 

A perfect example; you let the republicans totally control the narrative around the Keystone Pipeline flap and it ended up being characterized as you being a tree-hugging environmental wack-job instead of a story about the incredibly dirty, boondoggle and waste of time that it was / is.  Nevertheless, you hadn't cancelled it; just called for further review and planning to take care of concerns expressed by people in Oklahoma - not exactly a hot bed of Greenpeace activists.  Why wasn't someone out there telling the true story of stinking oil sands and the fact that all of that oil would be refined and exported, not used domestically?  Where were your people as you were blamed for rising gas prices by all of the republican candidates and their Faux News propagandists? 

Why isn’t  there a coherent message from your people to boost your successes as much as republicans inflate your failures or invent them for you?   And now – in the last crucial months of the campaign – you’re still not giving anyone a reason to vote for you; you’re bashing Romney and Ryan and looking petty and small and weak by doing so.  Give people a reason to give you a second term!!!  Stop worrying about Mitt’s tax returns – he asked Ann for permission, she said no, so that’s it.  You spent the entire first two years of your administration and most of your political capital passing the ACA, it was validated by the Supreme Court, now move on.  Ryan’s budget’s an easy target so fire away but what are you going to do in the next four years? 

Look, Barack; let’s be real – there is 45% of the country that is going to support you and 45% who hate you.  If you could change that whole black thing it might be less.  But you need to get the 10% in the middle and you’re not going to do that by preaching to the choir. 

Romney is an empty suit and Ryan’s a self-serving far-right reactionary – you should be able to defeat them without all this drama if the democrats could just focus on telling people how they are going to benefit – how we’re all going to benefit – by re-electing you.  But they are doing a terrible job of it so far.

Your barking pal,

JT

Romney has his VP choice made for him and awkward smiles are the order of the day...

The Paul Ryan era officially kicked off over the weekend with large, enthusiastic crowds of punch-drunk celebrity chasers armed with tiny glowing cameras or awkwardly pointing cell phones, trying desperately to capture a moment, so they could say that they were there that weekend when the turgid and frightening politics of the second decade of the 21^st century became incarnate in the mindlessly grinning Mitt Romney and his side-kick, the smirking brown-noser and career right wing sycophant, Paul Ryan.  Slavish but dimwitted media hordes dutifully reported this arranged marriage as some kind of potential tipping point – “a real game changer”, seemed to be the consensus – and the chattering class on Sunday morning television also had a field day talking about what it all means.  Well, I’m glad they asked. 

Romney was at a point in the campaign where it was becoming clear that he had nothing to offer; no big idea, no grand unified theory, nothing on which to realistically base a national presidential campaign except the simple proposition that he isn’t Obama and, by the way, Obama is a bad guy and a failure and hey, it’s my turn.  Heady stuff for the red meat crowd that reluctantly supported him after the circular firing squad that was the republican primaries but not much to hang your hat on as a substantive plan for the country.

Worse, Mitt was becoming kind of a laughing stock; clinging to his wife on a wave runner with a dopy grin, mumbling gibberish trying to defend his “work” at Bain Capital, trying to figure out a safe place to hide his tax returns, all while secretly attending all night meetings of the Toastmasters Club to polish up his extemporaneous speaking and trying not to sound like a rich privileged dork every time he opened his mouth.  Plus he had Ann with her multiple Cadillacs and dancing horse and hilarious attempt to relate to women by touting her own incredibly privileged life to get some street cred.  No, Mitt had nothing.  He was slipping in the swing-state polls and clearly floundering. 

So the party bosses met, probably in the basement of the Skull & Bones Club at Yale or some other bastion of rich, white men, and – over Cuban cigars and tumblers full of Patron – tossed around a few ideas they hoped would pull poor Mitt’s loafers out of the muck of his stultifying personality. 

The ghost of Ayn Rand haunts places like that; the devil that sits on the shoulders of the powerful to whisper sweet right wing aphorisms into their ears; “Fuck the poor and the doomed”, she whispers.  “They don’t deserve anything but the hideously banal and crushingly awful lives they’ve been given” comes the soft caress of her voice.  “They want YOUR money”, she says and the old white men nod their heads and murmur and grumble and curse just as softly.   “Give the insipid nominee some intellectual heft by choosing one of the party’s young turks, one who worships me as well”, she coyly suggests.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite like that.  But the choice of weasely tea party pin up boy wonder Ryan surely is either brazen overconfidence in the extent to which the country is pissed off at Obama or a choice intended to give him some seasoning so he’s ready to run in 2016 when they fully expect to have fucked up the country so badly that the democrats are unable to catch their breath until about 2050.  Another four years of John Boner and the rest of the hyena pack snapping at Obama until he’s exhausted might just do the trick, an ominous thought for anyone wanting to live to mid-century with a shred of human dignity.

So enter Paul Ryan, a career politician if there ever was one.   For 14 years he has represented a small wedge of Wisconsin cheese, centered on Janesville, a city of 60-odd thousand people, 92% of whom are white, located near the Illinois border, just south of Lake Koshkonong.   Middle America personified, in more ways than just geography.

 Janesville used to have a big GM plant – the oldest one in North America – cranking out SUVs and employing half the town.  It closed in 2008 as the economy tanked and the market for huge, gas-sucking vehicles collapsed as well.   But today, thanks to federal stimulus money and grants, Janesville has re-invented itself as a logistics and distribution center for the Midwest and is doing OK.  Ironic, it’s fair to say, that the federal government – the one that the tea party rabble love to rail against, that needs to be slashed to the bone to eliminate waste and promote self reliance a la Ayn Rand - saved the town that Ryan represents. 

Just as it’s ironic that, after Ryan’s father died when he was 16, he was able to use social security benefits to go to college – the same social security program that Ryan now insists has to be killed to be saved, privatized, so his Wall Street pals can manage your money for you like the geniuses that they are - allowed him to attend Miami of Ohio University and find his way to D.C., where he has stuck like a burr.

Ryan clearly enjoys the media meme that he’s some kind of budget Yoda, a serious man, a deep thinker, substantive and bi-partisan, etc., etc.  But in his 16 years in congress he has yet to pass one bill of any consequence.  His biggest legislative achievement has been to sponsor a bill re-naming some dismal and forgotten post office building somewhere for his other hero, Ronald Reagan.   

But most damning is his performance during the two-term reign of George the Dull, during which he consistently supported policies – like enormous tax cuts for no apparent reason – that put us in the fiscal mess for which he now has the balls to blame Obama.  Mr. Budgetary Genius voted for two wars during this time and somehow it didn’t occur to him that we might want to figure out some way to pay for them other than to decide 10 years later that the old and the poor and the less-than-rich should be responsible, as if sending their sons and daughters to do the fighting wasn’t contribution enough. 

“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
― Hunter S. Thompson 

The nightmare scenario running through my head for the last few nights has been this; they get elected, Mitt drops over dead, and we’re left with an utterly unprepared Paul Ryan and a sinister cabal of neo-con foreign policy and national security advisors scheming in the basement, looking to reignite the drive for American empire in the 21^st century and smite any unruly god damn Arab or other anti-Semite who dares get in the way.  “Mecca this, you swarthy pricks”, they cry as the big board lights up with all manner of military hardware, fine tuned to raise hell.  “And ignore the Russians and the Chinese – they’re atheists or Buddhists or some god damn thing – who cares what they think.”

In his own way, Ryan is just as scary as Sarah Palin was – he just doesn’t give the camo-clad mouth breathers a hard-on, so the danger is more subtle.   But as a fine example of the current republican trend towards the mindless dismantling of government as domestic policy and caged wolverine foreign policy, he’s a bright light shining from inside the beltway, a grinning, genial personification of the new right.

My open letter to Mr Romney...

I just got back from vacation last Sunday at 11:00 PM and, as often happens, wandered around in a fog for about 24 hours before I snapped out of it.  There is something about hours cooped up in the confined and uncomfortable space of an airplane that causes my brain to downshift and my ass to hurt.  I’ve also found that spending a week on the shore of Lake Huron, confining my TV viewing to old movies and swimming everyday also unravels the tightly wound spool of gibberish normally haunting my brain like inter-planetary white noise.   It calms me down and excretes the daily toxins – like someone is sucking the snake bite that threatens to render me comatose.

 So anyway, I was in this semi-blissful state when I went to the mail box to retrieve our daily assortment of largely commercial correspondence.  I grabbed the fistful of brightly colored envelopes with all manner of inducements - subtle and brazen and stupid - and walked back to the house, where I proceeded to absently sort through them before tossing the whole useless pile into the recycling when one in particular caught my eye.   There amidst the coupons for discount manicures and cheap oil changes was a letter – all red, white and blue – from Mr. Mitt Romney, candidate for president.  And it was addressed to me…!

As loyal readers of this hyper-ventilating series of rants know all too well, I am not in Mitt’s demographic, to say the least.  I believe I have made it clear that I think he is a dorky sock-puppet candidate lacking even one original idea, propped up by a bunch of desperate and treacherous bastards who should all be in jail and leading a coalition of greed-heads, delusional religious fanatics and low IQ, mouth-breathing racists.   Clearly Mitt’s fund raising apparatus mistook me for somebody else.   That became obvious as I read his pitiful, patronizing and disingenuous series of clichéd republican talking points, anchored by this stunning paragraph that I may well frame and hang in my office;

 “You are one of our Party’s most prominent members and I would be honored if you would join my team as a major contributor.  Your maximum $5,000 contribution will signal your support for my candidacy and help elect a fiscally conservative Republican with real-world business experience.” 

Geez, once I stopped retching I could just feel the old adrenalin squirt directly into my blood stream until I thought my eyes might pop right out of my vibrating skull.  Seriously, Mitt, I don’t know where to start.  So consider this an open letter in response to your plaintive yet completely devious and phony appeal to the fascists and the tragically ignorant.   

Dear Mitt; Thank you so much for taking the time to send me your heartfelt plea for money, but I think I am going to pass.  I have it on good authority that you and the rest of your swinish cabal raised 100 million dollars in July and since I couldn’t really shake loose much more than $20 bucks I am sure you guys will be OK without it and I’m sure it would just get lost in one of the “small-bill” bags that get tossed in the corner for you to use to pay for scotch and thousand dollar hookers.  That’s American as hell and it’s tempting but not this time. 

And I am a little uneasy with some of aspects of your campaign, to be blunt. 

Your “fuck the doomed” approach to dealing with the unemployed and those less fortunate citizens not born with a thousand dollar Italian tassel loafer in their mouth seems overly harsh to me.  Not everyone who is poor is a shiftless freeloader who is getting what they deserve – a little empathy goes a long way.  And as your more fervent religious supporters may be able to help you understand, there is that whole New Testament thing you may want to brush up on.   Sure, sure; Joe Smith isn’t in there talking to angels.  Still, it does contain a few worthy passages you might find useful.

In your letter you say that you want to “rebuild the foundation of the American economy based on the principles of free enterprise, hard work and innovation” but my understanding of your business experience is that it consists largely of taking advantage of struggling companies by stripping them clean of any valuable assets like a plague of locusts, and shipping their employment overseas.   And forgive me if I hear a little bit of republican fire-up-the-base code in that statement; free enterprise, as opposed to socialism, hard work as opposed to lazy-ass minority welfare cheats and innovation, just to pander to the rich propeller-heads of Silicon Valley.

Then there is your whole-hearted and idiotic embrace of the bug-eyed neo-con denizens of the Bush White House basement to design your foreign policy, which consists primarily of parking an aircraft carrier in the nearest body of water and bombing the shit out of any country that won’t play ball with the moneyed interests of “our party”.   If you had been paying attention at all during the last 10 years you may have noticed that jingoistic belligerence as foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired and there is more to achieving peace in the Middle East than having closeted circle jerks with Netanyahu. 

Two of your “day one” policies also make me queasy; you say you will “begin to eliminate the overregulation that us smothering business growth” and, at the same time, “initiate comprehensive market-driven energy policies to encourage development of American resources”.  That sounds suspiciously like you and your East Texas pals want to start punching wells all over the place, water and air quality and public safety be damned as long as they can turn a quick buck.   I mean really; who wants god damn wind mills cluttering up the landscape and those stupid little electric cars and hybrids.  The only people who drive those are Birkenstock-wearing ex-hippies who probably have a glove box full of pot, right?

But my biggest problem with you and your traitorous allies in congress and across the country is you’re a bunch of stone cold liars.  Your latest advertisement, regarding the Obama administration’s welfare policy is so blatantly false it makes my head hurt.  The porcine little miscreant, Karl Rove, is probably sitting in a bath tub full of warm mayonnaise giggling madly as he fanaticizes about the new republican century – a disturbing image to be sure.  But you guys aren’t going to get away with it.  PT Barnum may have been partially correct when he said there’s a sucker born every minute – if this wasn’t true, Rush Blowhard would be just another pill-popping fat guy loser living in a van down by the river.   But the corollary has also long been held to be just as true – you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. 

So despite the compelling “Please rush” stamp on your return envelope, I won’t be contributing to your sleazy little enterprise, not now and not ever.   If my worst nightmare comes true and you do get elected to “restore America’s greatness", god help us all.

Your pal,

The Barking Dog at the Back Fence