When one begins with a narrative already in place to which every occurrence must conform, it’s much easier to come to conclusions about “why” a creepy nerd and loser obsessed with others’ private lives suddenly won three state primaries against much better-funded opponents.  You see, the narrative of the week had already been established,  Liberal Baby Killers Bully Real Americans, and then it happened twice more!  Bonus!  Tiny, powerless, retiring outfits like Susan G. Komen and the Catholic Hospital Complex both got cruelly slapped down by thuggish, hairy-legged harridans, provoking ritual pearl-clutching and chest beating (depending on gender, of course), not from those concerned, but from those paid to bloviate about such things. While that whining temper tantrum was still very much in progress, with more to come in TV green rooms across America, the dreaded, commie 9th Circuit Court tossed Proposition 8 out on its well-scrubbed Mormon ear.  The God-botherers are, as you can imagine, thanking Supply Side Jesus for dealing them such a Royal Flush of false victimhood, and are not unexpectedly using Santorum’s “victory” to “prove” America is as obnoxiously holy as they are.

Right.  The same America that so recently fell for Newt.  As I’ve mentioned before, the dire problems the Republicans are facing in 2012 are all of their own making, and all a product of the descent of the party from governing idea to marketing scam.  As Americans, even Republicans, we are quite aware we’re being scammed, because its happened so often before.  Basically, the Republicans have sold out to a bunch of wealthy interests who don’t have the country’s interests at heart, and enabled them to systematically loot its wealth.  Since saying so honestly, much less campaigning on such a program, would never do, they have instead promised the moon and the stars to religious zealots, racists, gun nuts, and what have you, inconveniently guaranteeing a bunch of disgruntled crazy people watching their every move, when all they wanted was the keys to the treasury.

Putting up a malleable figurehead like Reagan, Bush, or Romney, and then using the now-purchased presidency to pack the courts and agencies with fellow plunderers, thus, must constantly be accompanied by distracting sideshows to fool the rubes into thinking the party is, as Bill O’Reilly put it, “Looking out for” them.  This time, the rubes are getting restless, and you can hardly blame them.

In all, this elaborate sideshow we still call an election isn’t an election at all; it’s an auction, and the cheapness of the bids ought to offend us all.  Lobbyists and Hedge Fund managers at least coughed up bribes, er, bids of at least a million, since that’s what they spend on, say, shirt laundry, but when you get to the banksters, America looks like a four dollar tart.  Really, Goldman Sachs, you’re only coughing up $496,430 to save America from European-style socialism?  Couldn’t you have at least rounded it up?  And JPMorgan Chase only stuffed $317,400 into Mitt’s magic underwear, undoubtedly in crumpled singles.  That’s about what they make on fraudulent overdraft charges in about eight minutes; and yet that’s all they have to spare to oust that commie who once called them (oooh…) fat cats?  Why do they think buying a President is so cheap?

The wrinkle in this, which I don’t think the activist judges on the Supreme Court thought through as they planned to fulfill Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” dream with their errant Citizens United decision, is obvious.  Republican voter totals in Florida were down from 2008, in the double digits.  Could that be the result of a merciless barrage of annoying, repetitive, and sneaky commercials, 13,000 of them?  Before the money tide rolled in, Republicans across the country were much more enthusiastic about voting than understandably dispirited Democrats.  After being doused for weeks in plutocrat-funded sewage, many must have decided they needed to shower on election day.

More interestingly, the attacks were directed at someone most everyone despises, Newt Gingrich.  Thus, though the ad onslaught must certainly have been annoying, it wouldn’t have beeen offensive to most people, particularly those elusive “Independents” needed in the general election.  It will be a little different when the gold-plated fire hoses are aimed at President Obama, who maintains high personal approval, even though both right and left agree he’s been a big disappointment.  Thinking people know Obama isn’t a European socialist intent on destroying capitalism, quite the opposite, and are likely to find attempts to smear him as such both offensive and dumb.  Best of all, Romney has nothing positive at all to say about himself that ordinary voters want to hear, not even 4% worth, so he’ll have to go on lying, flip-flopping, and bumbling while hoping some of his very expensive mud sticks.  Money can buy a lot of things, but love clearly isn’t among them.

Romney seems okay with that, but history might disagree.  Republicans (and the great majority of the media) loved Bush, and simply adored Reagan.  This undeserved and mostly unreciprocated adulation not only buffered them from criticism once in office, but more importantly, it got them there, and the same is true of Obama.  As I’ve said before, and it becomes more obvious each day, no one not named Romney loves Romney, or will admit it if they do.  The cheapness of the donors is, ironically, reflected in the listlessness of the voters.  On paper, Romney is the perfect candidate: looks, money, family, money, business experience, money, and money.  In real life, the paper turns out to be cardboard.

It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Well, who could it have been?

President Obama, naturally.  If ever a politician deserved to lose an election (or had less reason to win one), it’s this guy, to whom the concept of rewarding one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies somehow got lost in the shuffle.  The right wing went nuts over Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover story, “Why Are Obama’s Enemies So Stupid?”,  only because they correctly saw their slack-jawed faces in the mirror, but Sullivan actually wrote that Obama’s critics on the left were a bunch of dummies, too.  Really?  Sully trots out as unappreciated successes things Obama had nothing to do with, like ending the Iraq war, along with things he opposes, like more states adopting gay marriage and the growing movement to legalize marijuana.  He also touts the corporate-friendly and deeply unpopular health care reform as though it’s something liberals ought to be doing cartwheels over.

I’m left wondering why Obama’s supporters are so stupid, assuming they exist.  The right hates Obama regardless of what he does; yet he invariably chooses to appease them anyway.  The left hates Obama because of what he does or, just as often, what he doesn’t do, and on this score, he’s nothing if not consistent.  He’s as much of a hippie-puncher as, say, Spiro Agnew, but Village bloviators like Sullivan think hippies should love him anyway, perhaps because they smoke so much pot that they can’t remember what happened yesterday.  Another, wiser Nixonite, John Mitchell put it perfectly when he said to a disillusioned supporter, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Obama is undoubtedly good at saying things liberals might like; unfortunately he’s also a master at doing things that disappoint when they don’t outright offend.  Worse, the pattern is so predictable at this point that when he does do something marginally good, like, say, postponing approval of the odious Keystone XL pipeline, everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that as soon as he’s reelected, that thing will be built so fast it will make your head swim.  Remember when the telecoms were going to be refused immunity for their warrantless spying?  Remember when Gitmo was going to be closed?  For nearly every Bush-like policy he has eagerly embraced, there’s a matching speech about how awful that policy was, when it was someone else’s.

On the outside, Obama’s campaign (I hesitate to call it an administration) appears to think that its serial capitulations to its rabid enemies will make it seem reasonable and post-partisan to “Independents,” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  On the inside, I suspect that they are comfortable in the knowledge that Republicans are unelectable by reason of insanity.  As has been said before, Hope and Change is Obama-ese for We Suck Less.  That’s their strategy, and they’re sticking with it.

Of course, sucking up to business interests that are anathema to liberals is probably wise, given the out-and-out bribery unleashed by Citizens United, but I do think that so doing kisses goodbye to the millions of small donations for which Obama was rightly famous in 2008.  He thinks he can win without us, which may be true, but that doesn’t make it any less dispiriting.

The GOP has a knack for invoking desperate times, which invariably call for desperate measures, as a last-ditch effort to sell the unpopular and damaging policies they’ve espoused for more than a hundred years.  Of course, this approach is considerably more problematic when times are good: take the 2000 election, when George W. Bush was reduced to calling himself a “Compassionate Conservative,” and yet more absurdly, call for a “humble” foreign policy, but even with such blatant lying, he still had to steal the election to get in office.  You see, Americans are far less prone to turning upon one another when it appears that there is enough to go around; the last time we witnessed such a phenomenon they collectively vowed it would never happen again.

And boy howdy, did they ever succeed.  As the headline in the Onion so presciently put it when W was illegally installed, “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over.”  Of course, the Onion could not have possibly have foreseen that in 2012, we would be sporting a palm-dotted gulag at Guantanamo, a substantial constituency cheering for torture, two lost wars, a growing police state at home and abroad, nearly a quarter of Americans in poverty, and a Democratic President cowed into accepting all this, but they were pretty close. They predicted, correctly, massive deficits, environmental degradation, foreign wars, an increase in inequality, and more. They didn’t predict, however, that there would by now be a bipartisan consensus on the necessity of getting rid of Medicare, Social Security, and public education; bombing and assassinating whomever we choose, and wiretapping Americans without warrants. Nor did they dare to predict that Republicans would now have moved on to preventing black people from voting, banning contraception, eliminating unions, and raising taxes on poor people; a rare failure of imagination from the kids in Madison which must make Karl Rove chuckle to this day.
The term “Disaster Capitalism” had not yet been coined back in 2000, but it was already in effect. Not satisfied that vulgar appeals to racism, homophobia, and what have you were softening Americans up sufficiently for a full-on putsch, the righties decided to take away the one thing that really matters, the American Dream. For decades, this amorphous and highly manipulated concept led the credulous to believe that massive inequities were the cost of doing business in a “free” market, and a little human suffering was worth it, since someday we might all be Donald Trump, albeit hopefully with less silly hair. While the dream was allowed to live, both in theory and practice, Americans would broadly support at least the slimmest of a social safety net and choose as wisely as they were allowed to between guns and butter.
Well, no self-respecting Republican could put up with that, so the only answer was to ruin the economy, once and for all. People who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, after all, are far less likely to care about civil liberties, polar bears, drinking water, edible food, safe drugs, or a boiling planet. If your political goal is to have a government like Somalia, you have to have a populace that lives like Somalians. Mission Accomplished, I’d say.
The only problem is that after your “success” in ruining the country, you might not be so popular, so further measures must be taken. Let corporations buy elections outright, rather than covertly as they did in the good old days. Concoct false crises, say the national debt or something called voter fraud, to drown out more practical concerns. Find new scapegoats, or simply drag out old ones, to focus the blame on whomever you never liked anyway. But most of all, continue to ruin the economy; why mess with success?
Until quite recently, the plan was working swimmingly, but as we move into 2012, more and more people are seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately, the sorely compromised Democrats, led by President Obama, seem both unwilling and unable to capitalize on this, and preach the same austerity and belligerence that brought us down this path.
Good luck with that.

“On an occasion of this sort, it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind.  It becomes a pleasure.”

–Gwendolyn Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest

“Ain’t it delicious, being so pernicious;  fuck those Mormon sons of bishes.”

–Ida Richilieu, in The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon

I must say that, like Gwedolyn, I’m taking great pleasure in the fact that Mitt Romney’s primary opponents have been driven to abandon their most precious ideals in an undoubtedly vain attempt to vanquish him; when Republicans start to sound like Occupiers, I hear choirs of angels singing.  Admittedly, there really isn’t any mud one could throw at Romney that wouldn’t stick; there’s the phoniness, the utter lack of principles, the phoniness, the hairdo, the phoniness, the Mormonism, the phoniness, the weird comments, and did I mention a certain lack of authenticity?  If one were looking for a line of attack against Romney, let’s just call him a target rich environment in a $3000 suit.

But interestingly, Newt, Perry, and Santorum, showing that snappy originality for which Republicans are rightly famous, have all chosen to go after him because he’s a rich, self-entitled bastard grown fat and imperious on the misery of others.  In other words, he’s just what they were reverently calling a “Job Creator” about fifteen minutes ago.  So deep is their contempt for the lower orders, to whom they must reluctantly pander every other year, that they don’t see this line of attack as, well, undermining whatever thin credibility they the media has undeservedly showered upon them.

Even the dumbest Fox viewer, when shown the mirror-like image of lumpy, English-challenged white people lamenting the plight they found themselves in when  “Mitt Romney Came to Town,” as Newt’s docudrama put it, might actually learn something.  And what they learn will not only hurt Romney, but will also be a sticky wicket in the general election, when they’ll be called upon to vote for the party most likely to send them from their mobile homes to the soup kitchen.  As you’d expect, “responsible” conservatives, for whom top-down Class Warfare has become a way of life, are properly horrified.  Talking about job-destroying fat cats goes over like a fart in church with the Chamber of Commerce/Club for Growth set, as well it should.

Best of all, whenever Romney opens his mouth, a fat stack of tax-deferred dividend checks falls out, each day creating a miniseries-length selection of  sound bites with which Democrats can mercilessly pelt him next fall.  “Corporations are people, my friend.”  “I enjoy firing people.”  “I’m unemployed, too.”  “I’m glad I forced Teddy Kennedy to mortgage his house to beat me.”  The thuddingly tone-deaf quotes fall like rain; if he enjoys firing people so much, why doesn’t the guy start with his handlers?  Unlike the hapless illegals who used to faithfully manicure the grounds of one of his many estates, they at least deserve it.

George W. Bush, who was just as undeservedly wealthy and as devoted a servant to the upper class as Willard, is in retrospect starting to look a lot smarter than anyone gave him credit for; he knew how to sound folksy even when it made him appear clueless.  He never came out and said corporations were people,  he just appointed Supreme Court Justices to do it for him instead.  Mitt’s problem seems to be that because, unlike Bush, he actually accomplished things in life, nefarious as they were, he got a little too accustomed to unqualified adulation.  Bush, having been considered by his own mother to be too dumb to be President, was left with a residual touch of humility that served him, and as a result the desires of the super rich, very well.  The stunningly overconfident Romney is turning out to be a remarkably poor vessel for $500 bottles of wine, and his opponents see it.

Better yet, if his haughtily carried veneer of invincibility is so annoying that even his fellow Republicans can’t stand it, to the point where they start sounding like FDR just to nail him, that can only be a good thing.  If it keeps up, heck, even President Obama could conceivably chime in.  If Class Warfare works for Republicans, he might just give it a try.  Let’s hope so.

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

When I was finally called for my initial presentation, I was warmly greeted by one of the many (at that time) plans examiners, most of whom I knew by name, and rattled off the address.  Entering it into the computer, her eyes widened, and she summoned a superior.  Evidently this dream home had a rap sheet with the city as long as your arm: holes in the roof, rodent infestations, broken windows, uncollected garbage, plugged sewage pipes…you name it. I had to assure them that these had been fixed, or at least were in the process of being, but they still scheduled a pre-inspection before final approval.  In other words, the place was such a dump the city had to make sure it was safe, not to live in, but just to work on.  Undoubtedly a demolition permit would have sailed right through.

The next time I met with the owners, I asked how they had ever managed to get financing; I still remembered that when my mother bought a house not nearly as bad in 1986, no bank would touch it, and she had to pay cash.

“Magic,” he said, somewhat conspiratorially, “and photoshop.”  As for due diligence, they did make them replace the roof, but the out-of-state lender never bothered with even a drive-by, much less a call to the city.  The owners did have a good income and credit, though, which was evidently more than many purchasers could claim back in those days.  It truly was the Wild West, and it was hardly driven by homeowners; it was driven by easy money for everyone else involved.

In desirable neighborhoods like that one, houses worth $250,000 in 2000 were going for $800,000 and more, often in a few hours.  Every house for sale was polished and staged to an impossible gloss; those that weren’t had been already snatched up by “flippers” hoping to make a killing in a few months.  People were “pre-qualified” by eager mortgage brokers and hungry banks, prodded by giddy realtors, for amounts that reached into the stratosphere.  Occasionally a wary buyer would do the math and set a realistic limit for themselves, which typically meant a busy street or a lesser school district, and an unknown “realtor” who’d been pumping gas six months ago.  (And probably is again…)

This is why every time I hear someone say that greedy homeowners, Fannie and Freddie, and a previously obscure 1978 (!) banking law caused the Wall Street crash, I want to punch them in the nose, if only as a last-ditch attempt to pump a little blood to their Fox-addled brains.  In my experience, the overwhelming majority of homeowners of that period were just trying to find a place to raise their families, and found themselves, quite unexpectedly, as pawns in someone else’s get-rich-quick scheme.  When the banks ran out of blue-chip buyers to fleece, they moved down the income ladder, but the reality was that whether you were trying to find a starter home or a thirty-foot living room for your grand piano, you were similarly forced to overpay and over-borrow just to stay in the game at all.  Not only did homeowners not benefit from the boom, but they were left holding the bag when it all came crashing down.  Blaming borrowers for buying overpriced houses back then is like blaming third world children for drinking tainted water; neither had any choice in the matter.

When solving a crime for which guilt isn’t obvious, quo bono is the ordinary approach, but that concept has now been turned on its head.  The realtors got their percentage, the mortgage brokers got their commissions, and the banks got their fees.  The homeowners, for their part, got houses that may never be worth what they paid until long after they’re dead, if they’re lucky enough to still have them.

Must be their fault.  After all, Rick Santelli said so.

As we approach the 2012 elections, I have to admit grudgingly sympathizing with the poor Republican contenders on  some level; everywhere you look, one (hilarious) presidential aspirant after another has to deal with the fact that large blocs of their party hates them, for one reason or another.  The reasons, to a sane person at least, often seem a bit unfair:  the party of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay “hate” Newt Gingrich for being a corrupt Washington Insider with a tenuous connection to reality?  The party of David Vitter and Rudy Giuliani “hate” Mitt Romney for (barely) straying from Christianist orthodoxy, fully clothed?  What the hell?

Well, let’s call it what it is, an embarrassment of riches.  Long ago, before Fox News (!) and 24/7 hate radio, conservatives realized that the only reason, given their relative wealth, that they didn’t bestride the world like a Colossus was that their ideas were both dumb and detrimental to most Americans, let alone other humans on earth.  In his infamous 1970 Memo, which led a bonkers, elitist ideologue to a Nixon lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell spoke for fellow plutocrats in saying that, essentially, the far-too-comfortable rabble has caught on to our scams.  We’d better have a Plan B, but fast.

That plan, of course, was to flood the public discourse with propaganda from think tanks, media outlets, and newly endowed “professors” to spout the plutocrat line, which, as you might expect, wouldn’t be too successful if other opinions were heard.  Thus, the strategy’s practitioners, chief among them Nixon himself, decided that rather than bothering wih refuting liberal ideas, still a somewhat tall order to this day, they would focus on refuting liberal people, whom, duly discredited, would finally shut up once and for all.  The Hate Campaign was born.

This wasn’t the easiest proposition, understandably, given that the poorer and less educated group they were attempting to persuade would undoubtedly be harmed by their ultimate goals.  They had to go for hate, and go big, before anybody wised up.  To this end, taxes, which largely went, than as now, to support the military and (then, anyway) beloved entitlement programs for white people, had to be re-branded as extravagant cash transfers to shiftless Darkies; wars had to be sold as rare opportunities for vicarious triumph to an increasingly marginalized and powerless populace, and respecting foundational civil liberties had to be portrayed as dangerous capitulation to treacherous hordes abroad and at home.

It’s a neat trick, really….  Convincing the dumbest and most resentful in any society that everything, and I mean everything, they don’t like is somehow connected. Once you’ve done that, you’re off to the races.  You see, most people, particularly in the hard times Republican policies invariably create, are left looking around for solutions to what ails them; the key to eliminating such dangerous receptivity is to have the most reasonable, but unwanted, solutions pre-tainted by painstakingly encouraged cultural biases.

With Nixon, this meant a whole lot of industrial-grade hippie punching, and it worked so well at he time that it’s still in wide use despite its often tinny, anachronistic feel.  It may be both dumb and insultingly cheesy to lots of people, but the fact that the hippie’s modern-day equivalents want to, say, protect the environment, reliably creates a massive call amongst rank-and-file righties for more pollution has become, for polluters, anyway, the gift that keeps on giving.  That the (now proven correct) resistance to our retarded, failed adventure in Iraq was advanced by  our younger and less conservatively attired Americans means that Fox News “culture warriors”  will dutifully scream for more wars until kingdom come, sooner rather than later.  And on and on.

As I’ve said many times before, this is a project that has become a victim of its own success.  Hopelessly saddled with a befuddled band of followers whose hate, like a 1960′s Alabama firehose, must constantly be turned  on something, the Republicans are finding that even their own bespoke suits might get unseemly wet spots.  Just mention without utter disdain an idea that at some point a “liberal” might have ever endorsed, no matter how mundane, and the fury is unleashed.  George Bush found this out when he tried to hand his anti-labor supporters an immigration bill, John McCain was similarly chastened when he said, from experience, that torture wasn’t okay, and Ron Paul, who is momentarily leading the polls in Iowa, was nonetheless almost booed off the stage for the impermissible effrontery of talking about pointless, costly wars like they were a bad thing.

In their relentless pursuit of hate-driven infallibility, Republicans have painted themselves into an interesting corner when it comes to sewing up a presidential election….  Their people have been taught, carefully, you might say, to hate so much that they can no longer love.  Even their own candidates.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

Basically, the writer, whose name I have deliberately forgotten, has unwittingly summarized why we occupy.  Although most Americans have long since realized that our votes no longer matter, the more romantic among us still liked to entertain the notion that our votes, in the Citizens (!) United sense, that is, dollars, do.   The Cracker Barrel/Whole Foods analogy makes mincemeat of that delusion.  I used to feel good about avoiding Home Depot (as much as possible; I’m in the remodeling business), since it was a big Republican donor and had a sleazy, domineering, and ineffective asshole for a CEO by the name of Nardelli.   Now we find its only real competitor, Lowe’s, takes its advertising cues from Christianist hate groups, and after his disastrous run at Home Depot, the despicable Nardelli has failed up to head government-funded Chrysler.

Basically, there is no longer any way to escape the clutches of the rapacious 1%, and fewer and fewer options to keep one’s money out of their grabby paws.  Like zombies, they never die, nor lose their taste for eating brains, even when brains, or in this case, money, starts to get conspicuously scarce.  They just have to have more.  In industry after industry, the maniacal need for ever-increasing quarterly profit has sucked the value out of everything we buy, from newspapers to network connections, from bananas to banking.  At the same time, it’s slashed our incomes to the point where making moral consumer decisions is, for most of us, an unaffordable luxury.  Rampant consolidation and monopolistic control has virtually eliminated anything resembling a “free” market and the endlessly touted “choice” that implies.

Just as even the most conscious voter can only choose between far right and pretty far right, the most conscious shopper can only mull the comparative advantages of pesticides and penury, particularly in a time of fortuitous economic catastrophe.  Thankfully, this glaringly obvious fact seems to be sinking in, albeit belatedly; after the much-hyped boffo sales of “black Friday,” retail sales have settled into their Great Recession doldrums.  People aren’t buying what they’re being sold.   They can’t afford to.  As Rick Perry would say, “Oops.”