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.

Credit: Glendale Tribune

Seems like that ol’ cocktailhag Governor (!) of Arizona, Jan Brewer has been hitting the bottle again, this time when President Obama was visiting, and managed to make a little scene.  That happens to the best of us, admittedly, but judging by her babbling, incoherent performances every time she’s on television, the woman is never sober.  In a state (and political  party) known for its abundance of cocktailhags, Brewer is clearly the drinkingest one.    The funny thing is that the national media was surprised by this, or pretended to be, anyway.  Just as it’s considered unseemly for the news media to call a lying politician something so graphic as a liar,  it’s even more verboten to call a drunk a drunk.  Thus, people who repeatedly cry and blubber on the job can become, say, Speaker of the House, and a woman who took minutes of television time attempting to conjure up a few phrases of meaningless pablum is called, “Governor Brewer,” with a straight face.

Covering up for politicians who drink to excess has a sordid and bipartisan history; unless someone ends up dead, or perhaps in the Tidal Basin with a stripper, journalists have tended to avoid the subject, even when it is clearly interfering with the politician’s ability to do her job.  Worse, clowns like Brewer and Boehner, softened up by fancy lobbyist hooch, tend to give away the store to whomever paid the last bar tab.  As the temperance ladies knew, strong drink and loose morals go hand in hand.  This lesson seems to be lost on the news media, or more likely, just another thing they’ve decided that the public has no business knowing, particularly when it involves Republicans.

Thus, each bizarre and embarrassing episode, whether of crying, finger-wagging, shouting “You lie!” at the State of the Union or what have you is treated as some quirky expression of passion rather than a recurrent pattern of drunken buffoonery.  It could be said, and there’s plenty of evidence, that President Obama is literally driving Republicans to drink, even more than they already did; but if so that in itself is news.  Since all the arrests, unseemly outbursts, and slurred babbling seems to be on the Right lately, I suppose it will take a Democrat or two passing out in the punch bowl before the topic of pickled politicians becomes “fair and balanced” enough to cover in the media.

In the meantime, Obama’s handlers ought to make a note about meeting with the Cocktailhag of the Cactuses:

Breakfast only.  Too drunk by lunch.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” said the diplomat. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

Well, then.  The “diplomat,” who doesn’t sound particularly diplomatic to me, is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to the EU.  Earlier, in response to Iran’s hardly surprising threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to even stiffer sanctions, he said this:

“The strait of Hormuz needs to remain open and we need to maintain this as an international passageway,” he told the BBC. “We will do what needs to be done to ensure that is the case.”

Of course, Daalder justifies such acts of war against Iran because of its still-hypothetical nuclear program, and the force of the related “Killin’ Habibs for Jesus” foreign policy from George Bush and Fox News that Obama has eagerly adopted for his own.  No matter the vast majorities of Americans opposed to any more wars, the Hope and Change campaign is in an election year, which means, ironically, no Hope and no Change, when it comes to chicken-hawkery.

Since no other American media figure will do so, with the notable exception of Glenn Greenwald and a few others, let’s look at this, just for a moment, from Iran’s perspective, if only hypothetically:

CHNN: So, Abdul, why do all you dusky-hued sand niggers want nukes?

ABDUL: So you fat whiteys won’t bomb us and steal our oil.

CHNN:  That couldn’t possibly be the reason.  Isn’t it really because you hate our freedoms?

ABDUL:  What freedoms?

CHNN:  Never mind about that.  Next, we go to Pamela Geller….

It’s useless.  Now that “American Exceptionalism” has become our national religion, even the ostensibly “liberal” politician pretending to be president must beat the war drums until we as a nation are left limbless and caterwauling like the guy in the Monty Python movie.  Unlike politicians, ordinary people can see that we never “win” wars, we just have them, and pay for them with our futures.  And unlike media stars who “cover” our overlords, we actually care if their ballooning expenses are bankrupting us.  Sadly, wars, like every other major decision we as a country make, have been moved upstairs, and nobody has any say in the matter except those who profit from them.  Democrat, Republican, it doesn’t matter; the latter will loudly demand more wars and more money for them, while the former will do so too, only more, uh, diplomatically.

One dreadful consequence of the current Republican disarray, for ordinary people anyway, is that it leaves Obama free to pick useless, unwinnable fights hither and yon while everyone’s busy snickering at his opponents.  The worst is that nobody cares, and why would they?

Orwell must be rolling over in his grave.

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.

Now, though, the anal excretion that’s soiling Romney’s magic underwear is, you guessed it, Santorum.  It seems that a bunch of butt nuggets affiliated with the smellier regions of the Christian Right, worried that Santorum was, as Politico put it, “slipping behind Gingrich,” had a confab, perhaps in a restroom, in Texas.  These worthies, including but(t) not limited to Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson and others, decided that it was time to, well, cover Santorum’s ass before Romney wiped him up once and for all.

This can’t be good news for a candidate who hoped to leave his “moderate” past, wherein he kind of gave a pass to pillow-biters and allowed more Massachusetts residents to have prostate exams, uh, behind.  Other steaming piles, like his Bain Capital career and unprecedented refusal to release his tax returns, continue to dot the landscape, creating a stinky minefield for him to negotiate in South Carolina, not to mention the larger slice of the Old Confederacy he will have to tiptoe through on Super Tuesday.  Gucci loafers are notoriously inadequate footwear for such perilous terrain.

Further, since all of his statements against Obama seem to be pulled directly from his ass, as Paul Krugman ably, if so far ineffectually pointed out today, he is more vulnerable than ever to charges that since he smelt it, he undoubtedly dealt it.

We might find out differently on Tuesday, but from where I sit (not so broken-hearted) this isn’t what I’d call the sweet smell of success.

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.

As the Clown Car heads for South Carolina, let’s not forget what they’re getting into; for all the talk of “Family Values” certain to be polluting the airwaves, the fact is that the whole state is teeming with drunken, trailer park idiots like the genius above.  Until, say, yesterday, Thad Viers was considered a “rising star,” in that murky firmament, and was favored to jump from state government to the US Congress as a Republican in the newly-created 7th district.

Now, in these parts, it makes no never mind if you’d, say, been arrested a time or two for harassing and threatening your ex-wife’s new boyfriend, been in a drunken brawl now and again, or even rumored to have slept with Governor Nikki Haley.  (Threats to sue over this slanderous charge were never pursued by either party….)  But it seems to cross some line if you get arrested right during election season, and ol’ Thad did decide to drop his run for congress today after a five-month stalk-o-rama of his latest ex-girlfriend that included unwanted visits to her work and home and unceasing texts and phone calls, came to light.

As the video above shows, the guy’s looks match his personality, and one must wonder how awful the rest of South Carolina men are that he is even able to find women to harass.  One did pour a drink on his head; maybe she was from out of town……    Perhaps the fact that he still has a full set of teeth set him apart, but a few more bar brawls ought to take care of that in a hurry.  But then there’s the brains; the guy who rails, proudly, for 40-odd painful seconds about “unmandated funds” and whatnot, then proudly posts the semi-coherent babble on his YouTube page, fancied himself Congressional timber until literally hours ago.

Sheesh.