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.
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