Friday, August 24, 2012
Today’s posting is really just a place holder, to let you
know I’m still alive and watching the inevitable unfold, as you are. Weird things will happen, stupid things will
be said, and the media will cover it all as if it were a made-for-TV drama,
which of course it is. In the end Barack
Obama will win.
But first, the latest from the Republican camp. The person I was suggesting as an ideal vice
presidential running mate for Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, didn’t make the
cut. Good news, however, since the guy
who is the apparent choice is an even bigger and more conservative nut bar than
anyone could have hoped for. He’s Paul
Ryan of Wisconsin ,
a fellow who will make life easy for both cartoonists and pundits, since he
already looks and behaves like a caricature of himself. Wow. I
saw a photo of Romney and Ryan together, and the bubble above Romney, who bore
a brave grimace, could easily have read “What the hell was I thinking?” In fact, it reminded me of the pasted-on
smile poor old John McCain bore for the two months after they gave him his running
mate.
Paul Ryan has to be Barack Obama’s dream come true, or his
second one, if you count Romney as the first.
Just wind them up and let them do the damage to themselves. In the past Ryan has been an advocate of
privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and giving vouchers to the
elderly. Vouchers for what, I’m not sure,
maybe for discounts at Walmart. Let them
eat generic cheese puffs. Evidently the folks
who are running the Romney campaign have decided they need to capture the votes
they already have anyway. I mean, what
are all the anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-immigrant, pro-life people going to do,
vote for Obama? Not likely. Nor would they stay home in droves and let
their party’s chances sink even lower. They
really have no choice but to go with Romney and whoever runs with him—Hitler,
Pope Pius XII, Chiang Kai-shek. The
alternative is to let that rug-headed crypto-Muslim pinko one-worlder back in
the front door of the White House to scare the wealthy for four more years. Face it people, the president is just not a
job-creator. You have to be a proven
job-destroyer before you can qualify as a job-creator according to the Republican way
of thinking. It’s all part of the intricate yin
and yang of jobs, apparently. How can
you help the domestic economy if you’ve never been personally involved in
hurting it?
The simple fact is that the Republicans have ignored the sage
admonition Robert Downey, Jr.’s character delivered to Ben Stiller’s in Tropic Thunder: they’ve gone Full Retard. And everybody knows you never go Full Retard. One retard on the ticket,
okay. Dan Quayle, retarded; George H.W.
Bush, not retarded. George W. Bush,
retarded; Dick Cheney, homicidal but not retarded. John McCain, not retarded; Sarah Palin, well Duh.
When it relinquished its bigoted southern white half to the
Republicans, starting during the civil rights movement in the 60s, the Democratic
Party quite fortunately also lost its need to placate and pander to that most
mean-spirited element of the American electorate. The result was a smaller party, numerically,
but also a slightly purer one. For that
reason the Democrats have also eliminated the need for ticket balancing through
the selection of a vice presidential candidate, though the pretense of it, for
purely atavistic old-time politicky reasons, continues. But in truth both Democratic candidates could
be from the same state, or for that matter the same city, and it wouldn’t
signify much. Joe Biden certainly wasn’t
important from a vote-getting perspective, except for the fact that he was
white. After all, he’s from Delaware , a state that
means next to nothing in either popular or electoral votes, or in any other way. Democrats are
Democrats, and mostly these days they’re from the comparatively intelligent urban,
or at least urbane, areas of the country, where people grasp, however
imperfectly, the idea of social justice.
On the rare occasion when a southern state goes Democratic
these days, it’s probably because the black voter turnout is higher than normal
and they combine with the white urban and suburban moderates (i.e., the limp-wristed
folks who oppose lynching as a tool of public order) to push the state to the left
(formerly known as the center). North Carolina was a
case in point in 2008. But don’t expect lightning to strike twice
there, even if the state has been rewarded with the Democratic National
Convention in Charlotte
this year. The party conventions are
merely for grabbing the media’s attention for a few days anyway, and mean nothing
else. “Mr. Chairman, the people of the
Great State of South Dakota, home of the Corn
Palace and the world’s largest annual
rally of degenerate motorcyclists, proudly cast all of their votes for the next
president of the United
States ….”
Ho hum. Wake me when it’s over.
