Romney / Santorum ticket takes shape as Newt throws in the towel

In a little remarked upon story this week, Rick “Saintly” Santorum reportedly said he would be open to accepting the vice presidential position should Mitt Romney prevail  at the republican convention in Tampa in August.  So that pretty much seals the deal; the fix is in and all that remains is for Karl Rove and his merry band of super PACs to herd the sheep into the right pasture and there’s your 2012 republican ticket.  Romney brings the privileged white gentry and Santorum brings the delusional, crazed, ignorant and sexuality obsessed white riff-raff.  Bob’s yer uncle, as they say.  This way the republican establishment gets their guy in Stepford bag-man, Mitt, while throwing red meat to the snarling rabble who will do all of the heavy lifting by assigning Santorum to be his Boy Wonder. 

 They’ll let Newt make a big speech so he feels like everyone appreciates his gravitas and wisdom.   Today he announced that he was scaling back his campaign and no longer expecting to win the nomination by winning primaries.  He fired his campaign manager and laid off a third of his staff.  Rather, he’ll focus on a strategy based on social media and personal phone calls to delegates to try to get them to support him and to deny Romney the nomination, forcing an open convention.  In other words he’s going to sit around while Callista massages his feet and think up scathing yet historically relevant Twitter postings about how much Romney sucks.  Pretty clever, Newtie.  

Newt has to figure out the complex jujitsu involved in “obviously supporting” the eventual nominee after spending weeks and weeks calling him a pointy-headed moderate pussy who has no chance to beat Obama.  Don’t throw your back out, Newt.

They’ll also let Ron Paul make a speech so he can rant about his favorite causes and ideas, even though the GOP really wants nothing to do with any of them.  He’ll take the podium and talk about ending a tragic interventionist foreign policy, slashing half a dozen federal departments , and abolishing the Federal Reserve and the delegates will use the time to refill their drinks and take a bathroom break.  Let’s hear it for Uncle Ron…!  OK, we love you; we mean it; now go home.

And they’ll save the key-note for an up and coming republican star like Marco Rubio – just like the democrats did with Obama – to position him for 2016.  Of course this also is a sure sign that they understand the political calculus of having Romney and Santorum on the ticket together:  to give them their day in the sun and get them the hell out of the way. 

But if the Supreme Court validates the Affordable Care Act – something very much up in the air but also a real possibility – Obama can take Michelle and the girls and go to the beach.  Under no foreseeable scenario would the republicans even make it close in November.  And for all the traction a brokered convention could get them, they could draft Rubio and Christie and have Sara Palin and Michelle Bachman perform a lesbian love act in a kiddy pool full of Mazola oil and no one would care.  Make no mistake about that. 

If the court strikes it down as unconstitutional Romney is still in tough if the economy continues to improve – it would be closer but they’re still doomed.  It would be fascinating to sit in on Rove’s planning and strategy sessions right now to see if he is working on trying to maintain or increase republican control of congress – as George Will has suggested – or go all in with the loons and go out like Pike and the gang at the end of The Wild Bunch.  “Give ‘em hell, Karl…” 

Of course the court won’t rule on Obama-care until late June and by then anything could happen.  Between now and then the democrats will be working hard to press their advantage and hope to hell that they can keep the momentum.  

On the subject of jobs, there was a story in The Nation magazine today, headlined by this interesting fact:

 “Since 2010, a handful of Republican-controlled state legislatures have worked furiously to shrink government. Now, twelve red states account for 70 percent of all state and local public sector jobs lost.” 

So a key component of the tea party’s intellectual platform  – shrinking government – has increased the misery index for those states that provided them with the most support.  I wonder if the mob’s torches are still burning as hot as they were in 2010.  With tea party poster boy Paul “Hairball” Ryan having just turned in a hilariously wrong-headed budget proposal calling for even more draconian spending cuts while doling out generous tax cuts to his key constituents – and Romney’s for that matter – and increasing defense spending beyond what even the Pentagon requested, I wonder how that unemployment tastes to the citizens of those states who fell for the steaming pile of horse shit these guys have been shoveling.  As Randian fantasies go, this was a beauty.  It remains to be seen if this is what people who are justifiable pissed at the monstrous, larded, semi-competent aspects of government really want; to stand in the unemployment line.

And while empty-headed young money grubbing sluts like Eric Cantor scramble madly from one donor function to another, preaching the tea party mantra of government sucks / screw the desperate and the doomed among us, Rove and his obsession with 30 years of uninterrupted republican rule, (not governance; RULE),  is a fundamentally more establishment gig.  After all, he’s been up to his chubby man-boobs in republican establishment politics since the late 70s.  His vision is still clouded by the misty memory of the Reagan years and the glorys of a shining city on the hill.   He doesn’t really want to shrink government; at least not his piece.   He just wants to make sure his guys are running things.

The real problem Rove and the monied interests of the republican party face is they really don’t have much of a constituency left.   Running a Romney / Santorum ticket would mean drawing votes from the 1% - or let’s call it the 5% - and evangelical Christians.  No people of color, immigrants, students, or the elderly benefit from their policies and neither does the middle class.  And if I’m an independent surveying the political landscape, do I really want to vote for a ticket representing things like an end to the EPA, subjugation of women, governing by the rules of the Old Testament, leaving the sick and the poor to die in the streets and bombing our enemies to rubble?  How do you draft a campaign ad to make that look attractive?   

The political media and non-stop gibberish between now and the Supreme Court ruling in June should be fascinating in its banality.  We’ll watch an utterly vapid and colorless Mitt gamely try to show himself to be a regular guy and a viable alternative to Obama when what he really is, is a fresh version of that old republican stand by, the kindly, wise and rich paternal patrician – a George HW Bush without the stench of scandal and criminality to make him interesting.   Good luck making the voters clamor for that, Karl.

Illinois' heartland primary gooses Romney campaign - in a good way.

Illinois…the land of Lincoln; a man who was a great republican president and who became an icon of American political history, and deservedly so.  Today his home state held their presidential primary and the rattling sound you hear in the background is Abe spinning in his grave as he witnesses the odious quartet of candidates still flogging each other mercilessly and grabbing each other by the back of the pants, trying hopelessly to get an advantage, only to have someone else grab theirs and do the same.  “Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine…”    

Here where it’s 8:00 PM on the West Coast, it appears that Mitt Romney has been able to re-calibrate his “Inevitability Express” and lurch forward again claiming that he and only he will win the nomination and be the one to smite the Awful Negro.  He’s probably right, about the first part anyway, in as much as none of the other three maroons still running against him has the slightest chance of winning except if Earth spins out of orbit and careens into the sun.  And then of course their triumph will be short lived.

 No, it does look like neatly dressed, milquetoast, verbally challenged and utterly vapid Mitt will be the winner.  Or, he’ll at least have the most delegates when the eyes of a bored, sweaty and dispirited nation turn to Tampa in August.   Tonight his support, as always, came from the wealthiest, most educated and mostly moderate part of the republican stew, and – of course – the whitest.   These are voters who are convinced he is the one who will best represent their interests as president and who don’t really give a damn about whether or not Mommy’s on the pill or that Billy, next door, has a boy friend.  They’ve got money and the want to keep it and Mitt’s the only one they can trust.

Chubby Napoleon, Newt Gingrich, panting like a pug in a long distance race, is barely staying alive but like a half-mad Doberman, he’s still dangerous – to himself and others.  I had to laugh at his overwrought reaction to a comment Robert DiNiro made at an Obama fund raiser recently – something to the effect of, “Is the country really ready for a white first lady?  I don’t think so; too soon, too soon…”  DiNiro can be mildly funny but a clever comedian he’s not and he probably had a couple of cocktails so who knows what the hell he was thinking.   But Newt seized on this lame attempt at a joke and blew it up into Brown v. the Board of Education, yammering on about how this type of comment reveal that liberals are trying to divide this great nation and was repugnant and unacceptable and calling on Obama to apologize.   I swear to God, he said all that; or words to that effect.   Gingrich apparently wouldn’t recognize irony if it fell off a ten story building and hit him on the head. 

This is the guy who practically invented racial code, incorporating it into his stump speeches and bloviating about Obama being the “food stamp” president and having a “Kenyan, anti-colonial viewpoint”.  Newt is still trying to attract chicks by using obtuse imagery that they don’t understand.  This is a guy who has only done middling well in the heart of Dixie and who’s support has been reduced to that crazy ass guy who has the elaborate HO train set out in his shed, running under a full size reproduction of the Confederate battle flag.   He’s accusing DiNiro of causing racial divisiveness – that’s hilarious.  Of course, Bobby D is part of the mythical liberal Hollywood elite that conservatives love to hate as long as it not Chuck Norris or some other closet fascist.  Newt, it’s embarrassing…your unfavorable rating in your own party is approaching 30%.  Go home…

Which brings me to Rick “Saintly” Sanitarium, Mitt’s closest pursuer.  Unlike Mitt, Rick’s a man of the people; his support comes from a sliver of the party that is less educated, less wealthy, less moderate, but just as white – maybe whiter.  And they’re a damn sight more religious…or delusional; whatever.   Yesterday Rick came right out and admitted that he didn’t think the campaign was about the economy anymore; it was about re-establishing our freedom as Americans and preventing the Obam-unists from tuning us all into caged gerbils.  You know – those little bastards run around and around, accomplishing nothing, and only stopping to eat and have sex.  Heck, throw in some porn and some liquor and he could be describing many of his own supporters.   But the problem with Rick is, his idea of freedom is very different from mine – and probably yours.  For Rick it’s a perilously short distance from freedom to license to sin to a fiery fate in the depths of hell.   Freedom is narrowly defined and decidedly biblical and his damn vest it too tight for him to see that it’s his squinty-eyed vision of freedom that scares the shit out of anyone who had a normal human impulse any time in the last 10 years.  

On top of his apparent deep seated fear of women and sex and not necessarily in that order, his obsession with Iran and Syria and protecting the baby Jesus’ replica manger is even scarier.  At a time when Iran is nothing more than a working hive of honey bees compared to the seething, angry hornets’ nest that is our erstwhile ally, Pakistan – and Rick, they already have nukes, in case you fell asleep that day – he and the rest of the chicken hawk wing of the party continue to give closet sleeve jobs to big oil companies desperate to find someplace where they can drill for more of the filthy stuff, promising to kick Amadinijhad’s ass if given half a chance.   If it takes a mini-Armageddon, so be it, what the hell.  Rick, go home with Newt…

And of course those crazy mischief makers in congress – led by John Boner – are busy proposing every kind of repulsive and regressive legislation they can think of to try to get the democrats to take their eye off the ball or to slip something by them – the old legislative sleight of hand.   Got a transportation bill?  Throw in some abortion language.  How about another cockamamie tax cut for the rich while we yank medicare benefits from Auntie Em?   Brilliant!  We can pretend we’re destroying Medicare in order to save it!  Poor Boner – this sad-eyed son of a bitch is probably praying for November so he can go home to Ohio.  Every time he tries to cut any kind of a deal with Obama or the democrats the tea party rabble light the torches and egg his house.   He trotted out poster-boy Paul Ryan today with their half-assed budget – the details were “to follow” so nobody really knows what they’re talking about.  But all I had to hear was they want to cut the top tax rate from 35% to 25% and cancel Obama’s cuts to the defense budget.  This is bald-faced sucking up to their patrons and a defense industry that treats war like a crazed George Patton – “God help me; I do love it so…”   They have nothing; their arguments have become fatuous laugh tracks and they are out of ideas.  This is fundamentally why Romney isn’t exciting anyone.  40% of republican voters have misgivings about the person they voted for; never mind the other guy. 

 So Rush; give a dog a break.  I need something to write about and your ongoing stupidity is pretty bullet-proof.  I’m a disoriented gerbil gorging on pine nuts and sex in a cage – call me a slut – please!!!

Santorum wins the deep south and I really don't care...

New polls are showing that Obama’s approval ratings have dipped recently, driven down by rising gas prices.  This is a cogent illustration of how abysmally ignorant people are and how his desperate enemies on the right will stoop to any lie, distortion or overwrought hyperbole to try to wound him as their pea-brained candidates continue their feverish pie fight for the right to run against him.  Hey voters; here’s a news flash – nothing Obama does can lower the price of oil.  He could agree to the republican red herring, the Keystone Pipeline, open the north slope to new drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and agree to litter both coasts with new oil drilling platforms and it wouldn’t drop the price of oil one cent.  There wouldn’t be one drop of oil from any of those witless endeavors hitting the market for 10 years, by which time – if we’re lucky and there is enough money for the necessary R&D – we won’t need the god damned stuff.  

Of course, republican after republican rises on the floor of the House and Senate and gets all red faced with outrage that Obama WANTS the price of oil to rise in order to further some nefarious liberal plot against cars and to promote god damned mass transit, a disgusting exercise in involuntary cooperation and communism disguised as something necessary for the greater good.  You have to sit on those filthy seats next to some mouth-breathing immigrant criminal instead of getting in the Caddy or the Towne Car and just driving your ass wherever you want to go.  And buses…!  Christ, they’re like a county jail on wheels, full of delinquents and perverts and poor people.   You’re lucky to get off one of the things alive. 

Needless to say, this is nonsense.  And it’s curious how the party that is rife with belligerent chickenhawks who – if given their way – would bomb the entire Middle East into a smoldering pile of cinders and broken glass can’t connect the dots and see that the endless unrest to the region that this attitude enables is what really drives up the price of oil.  For example, take the sanctions on Iran.   These sanctions, which you feisty little guys repeatedly say are far too lenient, are already reducing world oil supplies by some 1 million barrels a day.  The threat of the pissed off Iranians disrupting supply lines further has the oil futures market in a tizzy.  And Santorum and Romney and Gingrich all want to get tougher and all loudly proclaim their intent to use military force on Iran to remove the threat of the developing a nuke.   So who is more to blame for high gas prices again? 

The other striking news of the last few days is the inexplicable slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians by a US Army Sergeant who wandered off into the night and went nuts in a nearby village.  So we again find ourselves having to apologize to grieving next of kin.  We have had to do that a lot lately; from mistaken drone strikes to idiot child-soldiers pissing on corpses or burning Korans and now this.  The local Taliban decided to avenge this awful random burst of hyper-violence by bombing a mosque during a wedding…or a marketplace in mid-day.  There were riots after the Koran burning in which six Americans were shot.  The recent killings prompted riots in Pakistan by sympathetic Islamic militants and anti-American agitators, as if it was any of their business. 

By some twisted 16^th century logic, it’s OK for the local criminals to kill Afghan civilians – horribly - but it’s really, really not OK for the infidel soldiers to do so.  It’s perfectly fine to stone young people because of their haircuts but if a GI farts walking past a mosque it’s time to go set something on fire or strap on a suicide vest.

 The point is, there is no longer any reasonable justification for staying there.  The only regret is that there has been such enormous sacrifice, death and destruction that to leave makes it seem like the foolish and empty exercise it very quickly turned into - so many good men and women wasted on the proverbial “noble quest” that was really just a savage and justified spasm of rage and revenge.  Sadly, it was followed by 10 years of trying to figure out what to do next.  After the first 6 months it was a horrible and tragic nightmare you could see coming from 10,000 miles away.  And yet we persisted.   We will leave and soon the weeds will grow tall and the fields our military toiled in will turn to dust and blow away in a nasty return of the cold winter of 500 years of tribal hatred.   Do gooders will swarm the streets of Kabul doing interviews with the tiny merchant class who will all say they want the Americans to stay so they can sell more tea and bread and t-shirts and Nike’s but that will ultimately mean nothing to those who want Afghanistan to stay frozen in time. 

It seems to me that the question we need to ask is, are we doing more harm than good there?  What’s the ideal ending to this ill-advised adventure?  There isn’t one.  Unruly tribes of primitive people will still grow opium poppies and a corrupt central government will spin its wheels in a futile attempt to join the 20^th century – never mind the 21^st – in a country with no discernible exports aside from the aforementioned opium, no infrastructure, no democratic tradition, no legacy of industry of any kind – nothing.  Just what did we expect to accomplish?  Under the best scenario we should have gone in and kicked the Talibans’ asses and rounded up the cockamamie al Qaida rabble and gotten the hell out of there. 

Instead, after ten years of incredibly random violence we have a generation of soldiers with PTSD and missing limbs and the enduring enmity of ultra-volatile Pakistan and an entire region.  The military experts continue to say that victory is achievable if only we stay a little longer, add a few more battalions and kick down a few more doors in the middle of the night.  Shades of William Westmorland and Robert McNamara…

 Obama is right, however, to abhor the violence perpetrated by one half-mad soldier; we’re the civilized ones.  We understand that there is no justification for random killing done on purpose.  But in the end, it changes nothing; they hated us 10 years ago, they’ve hated us ever since, and they’ll continue to hate us long after we’re gone.  Village elders will teach the children to hate us for the next 50 years.  If it wasn’t for the pallets of $100 bills falling from the sky, Kabul would be on fire by now.   It’s long past time to get out.

Surveying the wreckage from Super Tuesday...

Another tumultuous week in politics has sailed past at light speed with a dizzying series of events and developments that might lead a person to wonder – in the immortal words of a disoriented hipster many years ago – “What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural…?”  If I recall correctly, Mr. Natural’s reply to that existential question at the time was a muttered, “Don’t mean shit…”   However with the advantage of a 21^st century perspective, I feel that answer is no longer appropriate to the times.  There is indeed some meaning to glean from the furious outpouring of hyperbolic and breathless reporting and the cascade of events we’ve seen unfolding over the past week or so.  Witness, Super Tuesday…

 The cluster of primaries and caucuses proved once again that Mitt Romney is probably the least enthusiastically supported front-running republican presidential candidate ever.  Exit polling interviews all seemed to reveal the same sentiment among people who voted for him; “Well, I don’t really like him that much but at least he’s not crazy…” - thin ice indeed upon which to base the party’s fortunes in November.   He won 5 of the 10 contested states, mostly because he saturated low information voters with so much advertising they couldn’t help wandering into a voting booth and pulling his lever like they were buying a box of Tide or a bottle of Draino.  This saturation-bombing is the best of Mitt’s few ideas and certainly the most effective.  

Yesterday, puffed up with this store-bought hubris, he haughtily suggested his rivals surrender with honor, a suggestion greeted with a symbolic middle finger from the deluded but feisty group.   Newt won his home state of Georgia and as he is wont to do, completely misinterpreted it as a repudiation of those calling for him to quit the race and treated it like he was raising his battered battle flag yet again to march across the south, victorious in the next series of primaries and on to the nomination through his brilliant strategy of losing miserably over and over, thus making Romney and the others over confident.  Right…even Calista looked a little dubious on stage beside him as he tossed out this absurd notion.  Newt’s best hope now is to try to not be an asshole and insult Romney, who will then throw him a bone, like Secretary of State.  This would be a terrifying prospect if it looked likely that Romney was actually going to win. 

Santorum for his part continues to parlay his hallucinating vision - leading an army of Christian soldiers descending upon the snake pit of Washington in glorious victory over the Muslim, socialist, born-somewhere-else awful uppity negro, Barack Obama, thus making Americans safe again from the terrifying and insidious dangers of secularism, sex just for the fun of it, and Dancing with the Stars - into otherwise inexplicable primary wins.  Whenever I hear some addled citizen saying they voted for him because he, “seems like a good, Christian man”, I wince like someone just pulled out my nose hair.   But it is a measure of the insipid and vapid nature of Romney’s “front runner” status that a man with a 19^th century notion of morality – a social Luddite – with a completely disorganized campaign and almost no money can be nipping at his heels at this point in the process.  After all, Mitt has been running for five years, at least.   When George Will basically suggests that the GOP surrender the presidency and concentrate on not losing the House, the predicament becomes very clear.   Other than other rich white people, the only ones voting for Romney are those loyal republicans who have looked around and decided, “What the hell…”  This is not the kind of campaign likely to end in victory for Mitt and you can tell he knows it.  On to Alabama…!!!

 Of course, the other major dust-up of the last week or so has been the reaction to Rush Blowhard calling Sandy Fluke a slut.  This is hilarious on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.  My first thought was, who knew this asshole had a TV show and what kind of brain-dead maroon actually watches him?  How home bound and bedridden do you have to be to want to watch this cartoonish gas-bag pontificate for three hours a day?  Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons would be preferable and probably more politically sensible and informative.   Of course what he said was repugnant; he’s repugnant just sitting there.   But it was the aftermath that was fascinating. 

If I was a republican politician I would be embarrassed for any number of reasons but primarily because this guy is the de facto leader of your mutant army of liberty loving subversives and yes, you have to answer to him, just like you have to answer to half-mad Grover Norquist.  This alone would be enough reason to walk with your eyes downcast, guilt written all over your face.   It’s like Bozo the Clown was your pre-eminent political philosopher.  

Moreover, your ostensible “leadership” in Washington responds to the blowback with utterly tepid statements ripe with equivocation and dissembling.   Hey John Boner – Rush is a dick; why can’t you just say so?   Instead there is lot of nervous glancing around and throat-clearing until you finally say that what he said was “inappropriate”.  Again, as George Will so aptly put it, using your salad fork for your entrée is inappropriate.   What he said was reprehensible and inexcusable.  But you can’t bring yourself to say so even if you believe it because he scares the crap out of you and McConnell and Boy Wonder Cantor.  You’re a bunch of spineless worms. 

Lost in all this was the initial absurdity of a grave and serious bunch of republican MEN having a hearing on women’s health issues, as if any of them ever menstruated.   Ms Fluke only testified to a subsequent gathering because you hurrumphing knuckleheads were so blindly stupid that you couldn't see the irony.  “Me and some of the boys are going to have a meeting, smoke some cigars, drink the old bourbon, tell some dirty jokes and decide what your health insurance should cover.  Now don’t bother me, woman…” 

To me any attention given to Rush Blowhard was time wasted; he’s just the most overt symptom of a much deeper and more serious problem in this country, one that won’t soon be fixed.  As Leonard Pitts put it in a column I read this morning, paraphrasing; modern conservatism has become a landfill and Rush is just a seagull circling overhead.   I don’t think you can sum it up any better than that.

Limbaugh's ignorant rant puts a gun to GOP head...

“Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs actually…”

The overt craziness of the GOP presidential candidates over the last year, combined with their various initiatives to suppress voter registration and participation, roll back the 19^th amendment and reestablish pre-1920 dominion over women, build an ersatz “Great Wall” along the southern border and all manner of irrational and suicidal behavior, can be explained in the swiftly changing demographics in the country.  The GOP – party of Lincoln and the saintly Ronald Reagan – finds itself collapsing in on itself through a profound shift from the conservative but fundamentally loyal political philosophy of William F Buckley, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater and – cut out my tongue – Dick Nixon to a shrill, ultra right reactionary bunch of paranoid white people yearning for Dwight Eisenhower to return and for things to be somehow the way they think they were in their most dangerous delusions.

Buckley laid out his particular pungent conservatism in the first issue of the National Review; 

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. “

 This preference for a laizze faire approach in which government’s role is reduced to maintaining an army, collecting (very limited) taxes and getting the hell out of the way sounds grand indeed, particularly as a reaction to what many considered the excesses of the New Deal and, later, Johnson’s Great Society.   Faced with a large percentage of the world in which two of its most frightening military powers in China and the Soviet Union were communist much of the voting public embraced the notion of personal liberty and minimal interference from government.   It all made sense.

 Though that basic notion of libertarianism still prevails as a guiding principle of the republican party, it really finds its voice in  only one of the candidates – Ron Paul – and his enthusiastic embrace of it has marginalized him within a party less interested in freedom from government than it would like everyone to believe.   The modern republican party, overwhelmingly white, relatively well off and Christian is now looking over its shoulder at an America that is browner, poorer and less religious and quickly growing into a larger and larger percentage of the electorate.  The GOP as it is presently constituted is doomed by demographics so the smartest squirrels among them are stocking upnuts for a long cold winter.

Denying Obama a second term may be their last hurrah for a long, long time.  If they can’t get someone elected to the Oval Office – and they seem to be picking Mitt frickin’ Romney, of all people – win the senate and maintain their majority in the House this year, they are looking at a dark period of increasing irrelevance.  And surveying the landscape it seems clear that they don’t like their chances very much. 

The presidential candidates have spent the last month yammering about birth control, abortion, religious freedom and demonstrating their ignorance of the constitution they all claim to worship.  Rick Santorum can’t seem to keep himself from getting all red-faced and apoplectic about anyone who doesn’t hew to the same twisted belief system he espouses.   He was on Faux News this morning and was flayed and then grilled by Chris Wallace of all people.  When that happens you have to know the fix is in and powerful interests within the party of trying to run you out of town.  He stammered his way through a painful series of questions trying to explain his moral hubris unsuccessfully and was summarily dismissed.  Gingrich is almost an afterthought now as he struggles against the demons of his bloated ego and genetic belligerence while sounding like a delirious college junior who hit the bong one time too many, lurching from colonies on the moon to bombing Iran to a laboriously overwrought condemnation of all things Obama and our impending destruction as a nation if he’s re-elected.  And he’s hoping to god he wins Georgia tomorrow.

 Meanwhile state legislatures dominated by tea-party bug-eyed freaks and the losers who couldn’t get a date in high school are furiously trying to ram through 19^th century legislation aimed at keeping women in their place, supported by notorious gas bags like Rush Blowhard and Bill Orally.  They are using their moment in the sun after the 2010 mid-term elections to get as much regressive legislation in place as possible before the ship sinks in November.   Like those dogs that freak out before an earthquake, they sense doom.   They are feeling it’s their last chance to put in place policies which the public doesn’t support so they might as well shoot for every half baked idea in the tea party canon – union busting, anti-immigrant policies, dismantling of 40 years of environmental policy, and especially reducing the size of government.   But their 15 minutes appears to be ending.

As local governments grapple with the aftermath of a brutal recession, communities across the nation have cut back on spending.  Riled up, “throw the bums out” voters elected politicians who pledged to balance budgets, but now that the effects are being felt, some of those voters are changing their minds as they helplessly watch the slow, incremental suffocation of their towns cut off from the oxygen of government participation in the economy.   They ultimately will have to answer this question: Is balancing a budget in hard times a necessity, as House Speaker John A. Boner has said, or is cutting to the bone right now just too much to ask of a small town?  What sounded like a good idea two years ago has now come home to roost.  High minded ideas about cutting the government aren’t quite as attractive when that means you lose your job, the nearest hospital is in the next town and there aren’t enough firemen to keep your house from burning down.

This helps explain Mitt Romney continuing to win.  He reminds me of a drunk and clueless Will Ferrell in Old School, naked and streaking through the quad with no one behind him.  Mitt’s idea of appealing to a room full of blue collar workers in Michigan was to roll up his sleeves and talk about his wife’s two Cadillacs – you know – like one of them.  But the attacks on Santorum and marginalizing of both Paul and Gingrich by the GOP establishment – hell, even Eric Cantor has endorsed Romney - means that it has become as clear to them as it is to others; to put in place their unholy bundle of unpopular programs and policies they need to win big in November.  To do that they need to make sure that nut bags like Santorum don’t win the nomination.  And they need to make sure the audience keeps watching their left hand while their right hand lifts their wallet and car keys. 

My last - I hope - post about Rick Santorum...but no promises.

Zealots…!  What are you going to do with them?  You can’t please them.  No matter what you do, all they want is to set things on fire, riot and kill people.  Crazy knuckleheads…

Iraq is slowly descending into chaos as US influence wanes, largely because the two major divisions of Islam, Sunni & Shia, still haven’t come to terms with a 1,500 year-old dispute over who should be the successor to the prophet Muhammad as caliph of the Islamic community.   This dispute threatens to tear apart, not only Iraq, but undermines the entire Muslim world, from Pakistan and Indonesia across the Middle East and on into Africa.  Literally millions of people have died in this titanic struggle over something that is otherwise utterly irrelevant to their day to day lives.  It’s a particularly poisonous brand of madness peculiar to religious struggle and has played out in rivers of blood over the centuries and in spite of human advances in every other area of endeavor.

Afghanistan too is embroiled in a frenzy of anger, killing and chaos because some dim-wit soldiers didn’t have enough sense to recognize that starting a bonfire with a bunch of tattered copies of Islam’s holy book would likely upset the locals.  This most recent demonstration of ignorance and bloated hubris by military types notwithstanding, the response – a crazed and savage week-long riot and killing spree – is all too common when the Afghans and Muslims in general feel that someone somehow disrespected the Koran, or the Prophet or any number of other totems.  Killing in god’s name carries a badge of honor that is almost incomprehensible to the modern West where we tend to opt for more sophisticated justifications – our “national interests”, for just one example.

As we watch with contempt the mullahs huddling in the back rooms of temples across the Middle East and acting as the power behind the erratic Amadinijads of the world, we congratulate ourselves for being above that – we unabashedly spend our time in the more modern pastimes of consuming everything is sight, drowning in the cult of celebrity and proclaiming freedom and liberty across the land.  We could never abide reclusive mystics and seers telling us how to live or what to think or how many times a day we should pray. 

Cut to Rick Santorum, leading candidate for president in America in this year of 2012.  This is a man who stated without shame that he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, one of the bedrock principles of the constitution.   He stands in front of the media and distorts the position of the current administration, inventing  hostility to religion that isn’t there, inventing conflict in the hopes of foisting his particular, twisted brand of theocracy on the ignorant.  The question of how this man can even exist as a major political figure in America in the 21^st century may be studied for years.   Yet today he almost wins the primary in Michigan preaching an incoherent brew of suppressed hatred and fear of women, the danger of birth control, unlawful carnal knowledge and the crumbling edge of the cliff leading to mandatory Christianity, home schooling and a butter churn in every kitchen operating by a barefoot and pregnant woman. 

This is a man with no joy in his life, regardless of how many children he has.  Were he to be forced to choose to govern by the strictures of the old testament or the constitution, which would he choose?  The righteous who are primarily guided in life by these 2,000 year-old metaphorical stories almost always live a life of fear and hatred, shame and the suppression of all of the bacchanal impulses that constitute the great joy of living.  Like a repressive mullah in a sweater vest, Rick promises that if he is elected he will govern with the wisdom of David if only we will all live the Christian life he envisions for us – where we promise to not have sex for fun and hate those who we have a duty to hate.

Even more dangerous is Santorum’s – and all of the republican candidates’ – bizarre and irrational support for Israel.  It doesn’t seem to be based on any reasoned geopolitical consideration – instead it is required because little baby Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem and played out most of his doomed existence along the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. 

Why does Santorum want to bomb Iran to a pile of cinders and broken glass?  Not because of any imminent threat to the United States; rather to protect Israel and an Israeli government too intransigent to stop building apartment buildings in the West Bank. 

Why does his foreign policy prominently feature our armed forces as the point of the spear – the default for solving the vexing problems of the world in the 21^st century?   For that matter, what motivates Newt Gingrich’s equally belligerent design for America’s place in the world?  Is it Old Testament biblical “smite thine enemies with the mighty sword of righteousness” rhetoric?  Is it any less dangerous than Amaninijad jabbering on, denying the holocaust or the overheated “Great Satan” nonsense coming from many of the religious leaders around the world? 

The other day in a widely reported speech, Santorum contemptuously ridiculed Obama’s call for an educated citizenry, practically spitting as he called him a “snob” for urging education as a path to a better life.  You have to scratch your head and wonder what could motivate him to take that position.  Could it be that a flock of the ignorant are more easily led over the cliff – would be more accepting of a Santorum government that dissects the constitution until there’s nothing left but the right to bear arms?  How long would that last if you were not a good and obedient Christian soldier?

Maybe I’m over-reacting; maybe the only reason Rick is still politically relevant is a deep-pockets supporter enabled by Citizens United, (an achingly ironic title to a disastrous decision, in my opinion).  Under previous circumstances he would have been rendered irrelevant and be at home in his "workshop" in the garage with the latest Glamour magazine by now.   But that is the crux of why his continued presence is so disturbing.   In its befuddled attempt to support “free speech”, the Roberts court has – perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not – allowed and enabled this cartoon character to make a legitimate run for the presidency of the United States. 

He lost last night, as it turns out, and he isn’t nearly as scary in the light of a new day.   Romney is scary in his own way – as a cross between George HW Bush and Thurston Howell the 3^rd – but if I had to choose I would leave the male version of Joan of Arc to wander the country looking for a bonfire.

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

I’ve been trying for three days to write about the change in tone of the presidential campaign, about the sudden prominence of the culture war, and about Rick Santorum particularly.  But every time I get started, some new blast of hyperventilating rhetoric more absurd and purposely provocative than the last is reported and I am flabbergasted anew and left speechless with wonder that some significant percentage of my country actually believes and supports this self-righteous and ignorant biblical blather.  And to further confuse me and give me pause, somehow it is the same party that is constantly complaining about big government and government controlling our lives that is expressly supporting the most intrusive policies and demanding that the government they purport to hate get more involved in the private lives of those other citizens who they obviously hate even more.   Huh…???

 It’s a race to find the edge of the cliff and it has continued during this brief pause in the campaign festivities between the delegate-free caucuses and beauty contests in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, won by the surging Rick Santorum, and the Michigan primary on the 28^th.  When they say Santorum is campaigning like a man possessed, they mean it literally, as he can’t seem to stop himself from going off on sputtering, pissed-off rants like a deranged and savage Elmer Gantry.  Santorum wants to outlaw contraception along with abortion.  He also thinks prenatal screening should be discouraged, if not outlawed entirely, because it can lead to abortions.  He is adamantly against pre-marital sex, women in the military, lesbian marriage, and women in church without hats.  And while he’s at it, he is in favor of a theocratic government where we all live by his particularly twisted values and home school all children, eliminating public education.  This is clearly a man who has never tried to help an 8^th grader with their algebra homework. 

Meanwhile small groups of tiny-penis republican legislators are working to require intrusive and mandatory ultra-sound for women seeking an abortion and defining “person-hood” as the instant sperm meets egg and therefore subject to further restriction on abortions which are heretofore, legal.  This person-hood horse shit means that birth control pills which prevent a fertilized egg from adhering to the uterus constitute abortion.   Are you kidding me?  It’s hard to take seriously except these people are clearly serious.   Mitt Romney is probably listening to Santorum’s sputtering stump speeches, sees that he has somehow “surged” in the polls and is now ahead of him and wants to turn to the camera and say, “You people realize this fucker is nuts, right?” 

There is only one explanation; desperation.   Nothing else explains how a nut-cup like Santorum is suddenly the front runner.   It’s like the Nazis using the V-2 on London; they had nothing to lose and everything to gain so who cares if it’s indiscriminate?   We’re losing so to hell with it.  Set loose the hounds!   On second thought, maybe there is another explanation.   It could be that the average republican voter is so godsmacked by the endless and nightmarish campaign that they have pulled the covers over their heads and are just hoping for morning.  Meanwhile the bug-eyed fanatics, misogynists and end-of-times true believers have taken the reins and are now driving the buggy.  It’s still headed the edge of the cliff but now the drivers don’t care.

I never thought I would yearn for the arrival of a new Barry Goldwater but I find myself wishing – for the sake of the country – that some normal republican would emerge from the choking, toxic cloud that seems to be enveloping us all.   If Santorum is the nominee he might win a dozen states.  Ironically, Romney might even do worse, as there is essentially nobody who is enthused about him except maybe chubby savior, Chris Christie, whose own enthusiasm serves to cover up his ambition, if only the Jenny Craig thing would work.   And poor John Boner; he’s a hyper-partisan prick but he’s not stupid.  He has to be spending his evenings chasing the ice cubes around in a glass of his good scotch and wondering how they could have so badly overplayed their hand and gone from November 2010 to the current disaster.

Yep; the lunatics are running the asylum, at least for now, and there’s not enough lithium on the planet to calm them down long enough for the hair on the back of their necks to lay flat.  With Michigan looming ahead like a dirty bomb in a train station, it’s only going to get weirder.   I know one thing; if I was a woman I would be going door to door in my neighborhood and making damn sure my sisters got the message, were registered and ready to vote when the time came.