Tag Archives: elections

Political Rants

Wingnut rodeo.

Florida has voted, though not in such high numbers as primary season 2008. One wonders if people are getting tired of the new normal of multi-million dollar negative ad buys. Romney has his victory, much sought after, though the contest is obviously not over yet. Perhaps people are getting the sense that none of these creatures has a strong grasp of what is wrong with our economy and how to set it straight. Perhaps they are looking at the republicans and at Obama and thinking, who amongst this lot is going to do what needs to be done to pull the vast majority of Americans out of this ditch?

Mind you, I’m not a total agnostic on this. There is a difference between the parties. I wish it were a bigger difference, but there’s no point in denying that it’s there. Obama hasn’t done anywhere near what he would need to do to restart this economy and get it going in a more sustainable direction. I don’t know that he’s particularly inclined towards making any bold steps forward on that front – he’s Captain Cautious in that respect. I have a lot of problems with his policies pretty much across the board, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum represent a boatload more trouble for all of us than another four years of Obama would.

The simple fact is this: presidential elections always boil down to a choice between two people. It’s a zero-sum proposition. One of those two people is going to be president. Presidential elections, in my view, represent the smallest part of what an engaged citizen should do to move the country forward, but we ignore them at our own peril. If progressives, the unemployed, the poor, the overworked…. the 99% sit out this election, we essentially consign ourselves to a permanent Bush administration. Whatever the outcome of the current wingnut rodeo, I can assure you that the next republican presidency will be Bush III: The Vengeance, featuring denizens of an increasingly radicalized republican establishment and all your favorite neocons. It will be 2001 all over again.

Just remember: these are the people who drove us into the ditch. Whatever else we do – organize, occupy, push for change, or just complain loudly – we have to keep them out of the driver’s seat.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Heading south.

The republican presidential candidates are in Florida now, throwing punches at one another, making threats, and shifting course on immigration issues so fast it might give GOP voters whiplash. Former Speaker of the House and Pillsbury Doughboy Newt Gingrich appears determined to hold on to his tenuous lead, traveling from one end of the state to the other to toss around wild promises. In Miami, it’s regime change for Cuba (hard to see how that could go wrong); on the “Space” coast, it’s permanent bases on the moon by the end of a second Gingrich term. (What he probably means is that, by the end of his second term, the surface of the earth will resemble that of the moon, so the base issue will take care of itself.) It takes an ego the size of Gingrich’s – grandiose I believe is the proper term – to present arguments for re-election when one’s first primary campaign has barely gotten off the ground.

Gingrich’s grandiosity is wasted on these polite debates, though, and he knows it. That’s why he’s complaining so bitterly. When he gets a good shot in – “puts Juan Williams in his place”, as some in South Carolina have described it – and the crowd starts to cheer, you can see him begin to inflate like the Michelin Man. It is a wondrous sight to behold. This business of tamping down the audience’s enthusiasm is just, well… deflating for a veteran bomb-thrower like Gingrich. Perhaps this will give the GOP’s favored candidate, Romney, the boost he needs to edge out his corpulent rival. Damned liberal media! Newt told us it was all their fault!! Ah, the favored narrative… always a winner.

I love this red meat about Castro. For chrissake, guys! This stuff reminds me of Howard Phillips and his big, menacing map of Red China and scary cartoons about the People’s Army taking over the Panama Canal. It’s astounding to me that the Castro-bashing still resonates in present-day Miami, but I suppose surveys don’t lie. In any case, you’ve got Romney and Gingrich both imagining a day when Castro is in the grave, speculating on which imaginary afterlife landscape he will inhabit – the cloudy, white, feathery (if vaguely defined) paradise, or the strangely earth-like hell for which we have many concrete descriptions (including a useful floorplan from Dante). They might think for five minutes about the hellscape they would be consigning Cubans to in the event of regime change; something resembling Guatemala, I imagine. Not a favorable comparison, frankly.

And now Gingrich wants to conquer the moon – regime change goes trans-lunar. Should be a good race.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The elect.

All that run up, and such an unsatisfying result. What a pity the election process never takes a break here in the U.S. of A. We’ve been in a near-constant cycle of electing people since 2008, with whole cable networks devoting resources to consideration of the various candidates ad infinitum. Still, here we are with two primary G.O.P. challengers who appear to disagree on very little … and who mutually argue that we should go straight back to the same policies that landed us in the hole and the end of the Bush administration. It’s a wealth-protection strategy, to be sure – wealth as concentrated in the hands of the extremely well-to-do. There really isn’t anything else on offer by either Romney or Santorum, except an early commitment to war against Iran. (That should be good for the economy.)

We have reached a point where the Republican party is inhabiting an entirely separate reality from the rest of us. In their world, there is no global warming, no inequality, no corporate dominance, no limits to American military might. They mark the beginning of the recession in the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. They see the national debt as the cause of unemployment. On their planet, the only problem with our electoral system is fraudulent voting – i.e. people (perhaps “illegal” immigrants) breaking federal law to usurp a franchise very few Americans are inclined to exercise legitimately. All domestically produced fossil fuel, in their tiny minds, is somehow reserved for use by Americans alone, not simply dumped into the global market and snapped up by whoever pays for it (i.e. how it actually works).

This being the case, their standard bearer could be pretty much anybody. No specialized knowledge required – sorry, Jon Huntsman – just a willingness to carry water for the richest people in America and a corporate culture that is not only making more profits than it has since the great recession hit but is also paying less in taxes than it was in 2008. Mitt fits the bill; so does Rick “man-on-dog” Santorum. Both potentially good stewards of our national top-down economy. In fact, any one of them, all the way down to cousin Rick Perry, would be acceptable to the moneyed overlords, though I think it’s clear that the preference of the institutional elite is Mitt Romney.

Still, with such flaccid support, they must wonder if the right-wing rabble might be getting out of hand. Mitt’s pathetic victory demonstrates that winning this year is what losing was four years ago.

luv u,

jp