UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."
Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.
While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-Wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.
The math is simple: Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.
Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.
Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole. All the GOP won was some ill-timed name recognition and brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government shall become for the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.
This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.
For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually gain their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.
You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The Right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free." But the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.
Then there's the "Reconstructionist"/"Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.
Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.
As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto , PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, "Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"
Well, excuse us, the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And, what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything, including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul, and all of the folks who simply are, or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?
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