Republicans...my response to their response.

Where was I…?  Oh yeah; republicans.   First of all, no re-cap of the State of the Union festivities can be complete without a short pause to consider the Marco Rubio rebuttal, wherein he managed to hit the normal republican bullet points while looking for all the world like Richard Nixon debating Kennedy in 1960.  So much for the savior of the party.  Marco; you’re Cuban man; what’s up with the sweating like a gringo tourista?  If you can’t stand the heat, stay the hell away from cameras and claustrophobic studio spaces full of lights while wearing a navy blue suit.  Like I said, the substance of the speech was bad enough, highlighted by what seems to be a new republican strategy of trying to relate to normal people – the 47% - by trotting out some tired and apocryphal story of their own terrifying escape from a life of poverty by pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of free markets and low taxation – something like that; it got a little bit garbled there towards the end.  Looking incredibly uncomfortable and thereby disingenuous at the same time is hitting the political disaster tri-fecta.

This week, post-SOTU address, also saw the emergence - from whatever rock he lives under - of the Lizard King himself, Dick Cheney, who delivered a lively blast of criticism of Obama’s choices for his national security team, former republican Senator Chuck Hagel and CIA nominee, John Brennan, an avid proponent of drone use and supporter, for the most part, of the Bush/Cheney strategy in the war on terror.  I’m not really a fan of either of these guys, although you have to give Hagel props for being his own man and not hewing to the party line, something for which he is currently paying the price.  Still, hearing Cheney criticize anyone’s foreign policy choices is laughable – like Kevin Costner criticizing people for making bad movies.   This guy thought Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter were the best guys for the job – a couple of two-bit criminals left over from Reagan’s brilliant foreign policy team.  He and Rummie assembled a cabal of ruthless swine who still saw commies under every rock and wouldn’t recognize a home grown insurgency if it flew a plane into a building.

But Cheney is becoming well known for crawling out into the light every now and then to howl at the moon and spew politically charged bile like bird shot from a Remington 20 gauge.   He is only the most high profile, unapologetically delusional member of a party that seems to be in full retreat and disarray and – ironically – intent on continuing to empty their gun into the same boot.  

We have the bleating members of congress yammering on about the danger of approving the Violence Against Women Act, as if losing the women’s vote in the November election by something like 60 – 40 is entirely inconsequential and rooting out the misogynist wing of the party is not as important as just honing their message to women.   It isn’t bad enough that some of the delusional evangelical congress members still are insisting that trans-vaginal ultra-sound should be routine for anyone seeking an abortion and that doctors and other health care providers – who take a Hippocratic oath, by the way – should be free to ration care according to their religious beliefs and that birth control is for sluts.  Nicely played, fellas.  I’m sure you’re on the right track here.

How about some kind of compromise on gun control, an issue where an overwhelming majority of the country favors at least mandatory background checks and a limitation on selling weapons to any hopped-up meth-head who wanders into a convention center on gun-show day.  No, the party is so far in the thrall of gun manufacturers that there is no room for a compromise of any sort.  Surely the brains of the party understand that this is a politically untenable position and only the black helicopter-fearing, bomb shelter building, snake handling apocalypse fans are so paranoid and stupid to deny that it might be a reasonable idea.   But they seem helpless to change the dynamic.

One of the most amazing things to observe is the party’s economic agenda – they seem to have learned nothing from the collapse of the financial system and subsequent malaise made worse by the stubborn insistence that the most pressing problem we face is not the lack of jobs, or Wall Street reform of any significance, or real reform of the tax system but the deficit, a problem that would be solved by nothing more complicated than 10 years of solid economic growth and prosperity driven inexorably by a more prosperous middle class.   The average middle class citizen wouldn’t give two shits about the deficit if the bug-eyed Chicken Littles in the party would just shut up about it.  They want a job and they’ll worry about the deficit…well, never.

Supported by quasi-intellectuals like George Will the party is in a manifest state of denial over climate change, so much so that it begs the question; even if the clearly measurable changes in climate aren’t caused by human activity, doesn’t it make sense to use our most powerful weapon – modern technology – to offset the impacts?   In the end do we really care why the water is lapping around our downstairs windows?  If we know that doing “X” will help, why on earth wouldn’t we do that? 

Of course a summary of state of the republican party wouldn’t be complete without discussing the prolonged game of chicken they’re playing over the sequester and to a lesser extent, raising the debt ceiling.   Paul Ryan and his fellow geniuses continue to insist that the only way to survive is to mercilessly cut everything in the federal budget – except the defense budget, of course, which continues to be sacrosanct and in fact in line to receive more money than they want and they are not shy about asking for the moon.   There is no rational reason for this injection of additional money to a war machine that is currently winding down from two wars but nevertheless, some weird combination of fear, hatred and tiny penises compels the party to be willing to cut education funding, pre-natal care, long term care for the elderly, food stamps, unemployment, aid to the states and cities – pretty much anything that isn’t a corporate hand out or largess towards the wealthy in order to build more nuclear submarines, state of the art interceptor aircraft and other shiny objects that al-Qaeda couldn’t care less about. 

Much of the recalcitrance is simply a knee jerk reaction and a prolonged hissy fit because Obama won a second term, something I am sure was unimaginable two years ago.  McCain admitted that the unprecedented filibuster of republican Hagel’s appointment to Defense was because he was uncooperative and colored outside the lines when he was supposed to be genuflecting before the altar of mindless imperialism and the war in Iraq during Bush’s administration. 

The funniest part of the current state of affairs is that when the cameras are on the republicans complain that Obama isn’t serious, he is absent from negotiations, that he needs to come forward with a proposal, etc, etc.  But when he does proposed something as a starting point for negotiations, Rubio immediately criticizes him for daring to propose legislation without consultation with congress.   It’s so obvious that they are simply continuing the failed strategy of obstruction that cost them the presidency in November.   The good news is that the public seems to be tired of them and amateur idiots like Jan Brewer and others of her ilk are slowly losing their influence and credibility.  So Marco, and you too, Rand Paul, thanks for giving us your opinion and call us when you get your first new idea.

The State of the Union Blues...

I couldn’t watch the State of the Union address last night – watching a roomful of politicians is fascinating in the same way as a monkey playing with a loaded pistol is fascinating.  I just took a quick look but I especially like to watch John Boner’s face as he sits in grim silence behind Obama looking for all the world as if he’s thinking about a bathroom remodel of whether or not to get undercoat applied to his Mercedes.  Sucks to be you, John. The bitter and divisive partisanship at play in Washington and around the country in 2013 makes something like the State of the Union – traditionally a celebration of teeth-gritting cooperation between the parties – into a dangerous opportunity for public embarrassment a la Joe Wilson a couple of years ago.  I kept expecting to hear that Ted Nugent was making inappropriate gestures from the cheap seats.

But as I read the media bilge today attempting to make sense of it all, it sounds as if potentially humiliating moments were limited to some eye-rolling and nodding off, at least until the two official responses – first from the mainstream republicans and then from their bug-eyed knucklehead wing, the Tea Party, represented by Rand Paul, a man apparently suffering from a delusion which has him running for president in 2016.  He reminds me of the old saying; when the going gets weird, the hallucinating man is king, or something like that.

And that’s a good thing, all things considered.  There’s enough embarrassing behavior afoot in Washington already – we don’t need to make it worse through some bizarre spectacle shown on every broadcast television network and half a dozen cable channels watched by millions of citizens; some of them angry and fearful and some of them disillusioned and disgusted but very few of them in the mood to stomach the kind of shit that would be unacceptable in an 8^th grade lunch room. 

For the president’s part, he’s got some explaining to do – not only to his base but to citizens all the way across the political continuum - about his use of drones and – perhaps more scary – the garbled doubletalk that attempts to justify their use.  If you boil it down they’re saying, “Trust us”, and just in case White House hubris is flowing like cheap champagne in the Super Bowl winners’ locker room I’ll get in line to tell Barack and his minions, that isn’t going to work, especially not on those of us who lived through Nixon and Reagan and the dangerous lunatic criminals they each employed in their chosen righteous cause.  Memo to Obama Team; no one trusts you, ex post facto, so you might want to dial back the drone program and re-read the constitution for a few hours.  

Specifically, just because the amped up 5-year olds in congress gave you and your predecessors the right to kick ass and take names all over the planet, wherever your fiery wrath takes you, you might want to check with the rest of the world and take their temperature about it.  Last I heard there were lots of dead people and collateral damage and if you keep playing this mind-numbing game of “Where’s Waldo” with Al Qaeda big shots in the desert it will probably pay to get slightly better intelligence and wait until they go off for a little alone time before you start tossing Hellfire missiles around.  Nothing like dead relatives to give folks more reason to hate us.  Plus if the policy is to hunt them down where they live, it’s only a matter of time until there are drones over Munich and Paris and Virginia Beach. 

And while we’re on the subject of things that aren’t particularly progressive, why do your federal law enforcement geeks continue to kick down the doors of medical marijuana dispensaries, especially those operating according to state laws?  There are lots of real treacherous criminals wandering around Wall Street and K Street and other "respectable" neighborhoods where there is no chance of getting a contact high and where you might dispense some actual justice through the brown-shoed jarheads running the department.  Are these guys all ex-jocks still frustrated that the cool stoner kids took hot girls to the prom or what?  How can you possibly justify this inordinate attention to pot other than using a very strict and thought-free reading of the law of the land.  Anyone who knows anything knows that marijuana and heroin are not remotely in the same class of substance abuse and to continue to pretend otherwise is to further degrade your credibility, something local police departments – to their credit – figured out 10 years ago.  Even if the red-eyed guy standing in line doesn’t really have chronic back pain and just wants to get a buzz, who really gives a shit other than perhaps his mother and father?  On the other hand, the hyperventilating and crazy son of a bitch down the hall who’s been doing crystal all day and now decides he needs to take his 9MM down to 7-11 so he can get some beer and calm down – well we all know that’s a different story.  Go get him and leave the pot heads alone. 

Finally, for Christ’s sake, stop deporting people for a month or so.  I mean, what’s the end game here?  Do you really think that you can get them all out, a la Mitt Romney?  If not then you are discriminating by definition and letting pointy-headed bureaucrats run amok, shipping brown people over the border where they land flat in the middle of a drug war that makes East Oakland look like a pillow fight.  What’s the point?  What are you trying to prove – what a tough guy you are?  Let Rick Perry pretend to be a tough guy.  You’re from Chicago – you’re supposed to be cool like that.  Just stop it unless you really think it’s good for the country to ship the padre de familia back to Mexico, leaving his wife and kids in some hell-hole apartment to eat beans and tortillas and wait for the landlord to come and throw them into the street.  Jesus…

Now as to the republicans…(to be continued).