The reaction to those Republican candidates criticizing Romney for his career as a vulture capitalist is extremely telling, of course, just as was the Catholic Church putting Galileo under house arrest. In neither case did the offended institution bother asking whether the ideas being floated had any merit to them. No, my friends, neither the Catholic Church nor the Republican Church have any interest in the dissemination of truth. Quite to the contrary, their interest is precisely the opposite. Hordes of Republican blowhards (pardon the redundancy there) have been savaging Gingrich and Perry for mounting "Democratic-style class warfare' critiques of Romney, never stopping to actually inquire as to what Bain Capital actually did under his stewardship. Of course, they don't need to ask. They already know. What's critical is that you never do.
All in all, the GOP is in deep trouble, at least over the long haul. I think they know it, too. They're all standing around at this point waiting for a Reagan to come rescue them. That's not gonna happen, not least of which because even Reagan was never "REAGAN!". Like Bernie Madoff, the Party's lies and schemes are beginning to catch up with it. And as with Madoff, it is the rest of us who will principally pay the price. The real questions are why this hasn't happened sooner, why the party was able to resuscitate itself relatively unscathed from the disaster of actually governing under its avowed principles this last decade, and why it has a good shot at the White House this year?
Those are, of course, easy questions to answer. If the top ranks of the Republican Party are of a quality that would be considered pathetic anywhere outside of Zimbabwe, the leading lights of the Democrats are equally dismal. You have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then there's... Joe Biden? Harry Reid? Andrew Cuomo? It's quite amazing really. Add up all the prominent Democrats in Congress, in the cabinet and in statehouses, and there isn't a single one -- regardless even of their politics -- who remotely inspires. Moreover, if we're honest about Obama and Clinton, it's patently obvious that they are almost entirely notable for who they physically are, not what they've done or where they stand. Take away his skin tone and her genitalia, and you're left with a pair of two-dimensional cardboard B-rate political nothingburgers. History will record Obama's sole claim to fame as getting elected. No one will ever know what he really stands for, other than maintaining the status quo so that he can comfortably tuck the one percent into bed each night. Her only genuine political commitment in life (at least, that is, before she and her husband were completely coopted by the plutocracy), seems to have been a devotion to the controversial idea of taking good care of our children. Wow. Now that's bold.
Obama and his party are failures for the same reason the GOP has been failing for so long. They all serve the same master, and I got news for you, pal: It ain't you, me, or the 300 million people in America's 99 percent. This isn't complicated stuff. You can put away your slide rule. It's simple: If you are governing to advance the interest of predators, and doing so at the expense of the people, the predators will prosper and the people will suffer. By design. What, you don't like that? No problem, you can simply vote for the other party, the one that's not in office. Just one problem, though. They have exactly the same economic policies as the one that is.
We live in the strangest of times. Our politics have hardly ever been more strident, and yet we fight over almost nothing. We have enormous problems facing us, ranging from rampant and structural unemployment to broken empire to climate holocaust, and yet we're consumed with trivia. Our candidate running on the platform of hope and change could not possibly be more beholden to the special interests who have robbed an entire global economy of hope in order to prevent change and fatten their already bulging wallets. The political party that led the country and the world over the cliff for a decade came back to win a stunning victory just two years later, and is poised to possibly win another one again. The people who created a massive national debt can somehow plausibly score endless political points complaining about that same debt. One of the worst things you can be accused of is trying to turn America into a "European socialist state' at exactly the moment when the true European socialist states are precisely the countries providing the best quality of life, most economic security, and the most stable economies for their citizens of any in the world. Here at home, we have very clear empirical evidence from two post-war periods -- one each of liberal and conservative economic policy prescriptions -- of what happens when you go either of those directions, and no one recognizes that the experiment was even conducted. The list goes on. Rod Serling, you're way overdue on the set, baby. Dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee...
Hunter Thompson was certainly right. When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. But we're beyond all that now. America has fielded its All-Century Team when it comes to nutty politics. The good news, though, is that some people are finally starting to wake up to what we're facing, and just who is diddling whom.
That can't be good news for the Geriatric Obfuscating Pathology otherwise known as the Republican Party.
All in all, the GOP is in deep trouble, at least over the long haul. I think they know it, too. They're all standing around at this point waiting for a Reagan to come rescue them. That's not gonna happen, not least of which because even Reagan was never "REAGAN!". Like Bernie Madoff, the Party's lies and schemes are beginning to catch up with it. And as with Madoff, it is the rest of us who will principally pay the price. The real questions are why this hasn't happened sooner, why the party was able to resuscitate itself relatively unscathed from the disaster of actually governing under its avowed principles this last decade, and why it has a good shot at the White House this year?
Those are, of course, easy questions to answer. If the top ranks of the Republican Party are of a quality that would be considered pathetic anywhere outside of Zimbabwe, the leading lights of the Democrats are equally dismal. You have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then there's... Joe Biden? Harry Reid? Andrew Cuomo? It's quite amazing really. Add up all the prominent Democrats in Congress, in the cabinet and in statehouses, and there isn't a single one -- regardless even of their politics -- who remotely inspires. Moreover, if we're honest about Obama and Clinton, it's patently obvious that they are almost entirely notable for who they physically are, not what they've done or where they stand. Take away his skin tone and her genitalia, and you're left with a pair of two-dimensional cardboard B-rate political nothingburgers. History will record Obama's sole claim to fame as getting elected. No one will ever know what he really stands for, other than maintaining the status quo so that he can comfortably tuck the one percent into bed each night. Her only genuine political commitment in life (at least, that is, before she and her husband were completely coopted by the plutocracy), seems to have been a devotion to the controversial idea of taking good care of our children. Wow. Now that's bold.
Obama and his party are failures for the same reason the GOP has been failing for so long. They all serve the same master, and I got news for you, pal: It ain't you, me, or the 300 million people in America's 99 percent. This isn't complicated stuff. You can put away your slide rule. It's simple: If you are governing to advance the interest of predators, and doing so at the expense of the people, the predators will prosper and the people will suffer. By design. What, you don't like that? No problem, you can simply vote for the other party, the one that's not in office. Just one problem, though. They have exactly the same economic policies as the one that is.
We live in the strangest of times. Our politics have hardly ever been more strident, and yet we fight over almost nothing. We have enormous problems facing us, ranging from rampant and structural unemployment to broken empire to climate holocaust, and yet we're consumed with trivia. Our candidate running on the platform of hope and change could not possibly be more beholden to the special interests who have robbed an entire global economy of hope in order to prevent change and fatten their already bulging wallets. The political party that led the country and the world over the cliff for a decade came back to win a stunning victory just two years later, and is poised to possibly win another one again. The people who created a massive national debt can somehow plausibly score endless political points complaining about that same debt. One of the worst things you can be accused of is trying to turn America into a "European socialist state' at exactly the moment when the true European socialist states are precisely the countries providing the best quality of life, most economic security, and the most stable economies for their citizens of any in the world. Here at home, we have very clear empirical evidence from two post-war periods -- one each of liberal and conservative economic policy prescriptions -- of what happens when you go either of those directions, and no one recognizes that the experiment was even conducted. The list goes on. Rod Serling, you're way overdue on the set, baby. Dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee...
Hunter Thompson was certainly right. When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. But we're beyond all that now. America has fielded its All-Century Team when it comes to nutty politics. The good news, though, is that some people are finally starting to wake up to what we're facing, and just who is diddling whom.
That can't be good news for the Geriatric Obfuscating Pathology otherwise known as the Republican Party.
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