Shot in the ass, the hero crawled away into the brush--"The Boss is Crazy Too: The Story of a Boy and his Dog of a Boss, Mel Lazarus, 1963
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Republican Candidate Vetting Process 2012
George Will made a comment concerning gay marriage this morning on his weekly attempt to pretend his baseball writing isn't the only thing anyone will remember him for to the effect that the opposition to gay marriage is literally dying. Mitt Romney went to a boxing match and jinxed the guy who lost by encouraging him. Common Cause and the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives filed suit against the Senate for using the filabuster. As absentee ballots and provisional ballots continue to be counted, Romney appears to have lost by more...
Well, life sucks if you're willing yourself extinct. If you've been reading my stuff, you know that I have an unrequitted, secret love for Maureen Dowd. We're about the same age, same ethnciity, same cultural bias, same religious roots -- although I suspect she's still a practicing Catholic as opposed to an anti-theist -- and we both like words, wit and traditional Catholic social values. She went to Catholic University, I went to Holy Cross. She graduated and went off to become a practicing political reporter, then occasional columnist and then anchor columnist on Sunday and Wednesday for the Times. Me, I joined the Army so I could extend my adolescence for another 23 years, playing with guns, working out, blowing things up...I think in a lot of ways, I got the better deal.
But damn, she writes well. When she's really off her game, she's pretty good. When she's good, she's very good indeed. When she's really good, DAMN. This is one of those columns. Her thesis, not all that different from Will's insight, is that the Republicans are going willfully extinct as a national party. She begins with an interesting anecdote:
My college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn. My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?” Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to its extinction. Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans. The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.
While there were a lot of contributing factors in 2012, there are moments when you just had to stand there and wonder WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING? The only really viable candidates nationally were probably Pawlenty and Huntsman and only Huntsman had a vision that didn't seem to involve hiring a witch hunter profundis and taking us all back to the dark ages. So, Pawlenty and Huntsman were gone very early. A pizza magnate, a menopausal madwoman who confused John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy when announcing her candidacy, a ego-drunk sack of hypocritical yesteryears claiming with some justification to being the intellectual center of the Republican world, W.2 -- a tall Aggie who was meaner, dumber and in this case zonked on pain medicationa troll from Texas who thinks it makes sense to base the modern world on the standards of the Roman empire, and Mitt Romney were the possibilities; in fact, most of the possibilities arose as temporarily viable because they had the virtue of not being Mitt Romney. After Romney survives a war of attrition, he then selects an Eddie Munster look alike who actually refused to explain the math behind his tax reform and budgetary plans. Romney is revealed as a lumbering clown -- of course, he did that quite well last time, and the reality showed through to the deniers with the 47% crack -- beginning at the Iowa State Fair when he argues that "Corporations are people too, my friend."I'm not the Virginian, and you aren't Travis. Don't smile when you say that, you grinning zombie. Don't say it. Don't call me friend when you're not my friend.
Republican Convention 2012
Then we have a comedy of errors going on all 2012. Transvaginal probes. Eighty two members of the Democratic Party are card carrying members of the Communist Party. The Female body has defense mechanisms that kick in when there's legitimate rape. The sky is falling and massive inflation is right around the corner. Obama is a Kenyan Socialist Manchurian Candidate. A child conceived in rape is a blessing from God. (By that logic, Rosemary's Baby would be a blessing from God.) Cut taxes on the rich; cut spending on the poor, on education, on infrastructure. Government can't create jobs! (Particularly liked this when it was some Republican house member or Senator with 20 years seniority saying it.) We love our warfighters -- but if we take care of the Veterans, we're going to bust the budget and raise the deficit. "Hell no you won't!" Success in Libya, Iraq and a end-date to the Afgnasy (Yeah, I'm channeling the Russians here) ordeal are signs of weakness; not bombing Iran and widening that conflict at the bidding of the craziest of the Zionists in Israel; advocating war in Syria; and on and on and on...
What were they thinking?I watched the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox a couple of times and actually found it painful...but you know, facts have a way of biting you in the ass if you ignore them. I kinda, sorta actually felt bad for the guy -- he looked like a fat kid denied someone else's hotdog. The guy who coined the phrase "reality-based" as a pejorative was getting bitchslapped by that reality. As lots of commentators have noted, the facts seem to have a liberal bias these days.
Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?
I think it's possible, and patriotic, to vote against your own interests for the common good. But, the Republicans by hitching their wagons to Ayn Rand, a God not familiar to most readers of the New Testament, denigration of women, denigation of workers, greed, guns, racism and intrusion while trying to wrap it up as "Freedom!" really couldn't claim anything for the common good. Romney's dancing horse really sums them up in a way so apt; he actually believes that saying things like the trees are the right height was a way to connect. Bragging that he had always paid at least 13% was tone-deaf. Demanding greater disclosure from Ryan than he was willing to disclose to the American people on his taxes is kind of amazing. Mormons are not generally considered exemplars of chutzpah, but damn...
Expect more convulsions. We are a deeply divided country in a lot of ways, but if the Democrats stay charged up and the President takes it to the Republicans actually using the bully pulpit as opposed to occasionally polishing it with a deep coat of linseed oil, then we'll see. But right now, I see no way the Republican party as it is now survives as a relevant force. 
Souls of the Republican Party 2012
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