Four Weeks

It's now four weeks until the 2012 elections, and things are going just about as expected; that is, chaotic, mind-blowing and depressing all at the same time.

The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on.  Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death.  The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s.  For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times.  There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring.  While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive.  More on that later.

There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task.  Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high.  All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches.  Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives.  He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.

It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them.  And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so.  For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story.  His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.

The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate.  This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.

As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.

On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry.  One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona.  Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one.  What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created.  But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.

Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified.  But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity.  These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda.  The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities.  This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government.  It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election.  Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.

Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent.  Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state.  And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.

A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level.  I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not.  For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.

Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face.  But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best.  Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.

Down The Tubes

The level of political discourse in this country is really headed down the toilet as we enter the home stretch of summer. The right-wing opponents of President Obama have stooped to new lows, even for them, and the fact that they are surpassing their own benchmarks of idiocy and deadheaded stupidity is a truly alarming development.

First off, the birthers still refuse to give up and go away despite the mountains of overwhelming evidence against their god-forsaken yammering. Their latest stink bomb is a supposed copy of Obama's Kenyan birth certificate. Salon.com does a much better job of refuting this nonsense than I could, so if you're interested please check out their website here. But over and over again the right-wingers will grasp onto whatever paper-thin shred of evidence they can dream up (even something which is a ridiculous outright forgery as this) and give it the aura of unassailable truth. When you have to start manufacturing evidence to back up your moronic claims, you're pretty much out of gas. But the conservative pundits have never let inconvenient things like the truth get in the way of shooting off their big mouths.

Next up in the idiot parade are all the rude, immature dickheads who are standing up at "town hall" meetings with their Congressional representatives and screaming and shouting them down when it comes to reforming health care. It's obvious that these "spontaneous" outbursts are anything but, because the blowhards on conservative radio are clearing advocating and coordinating these efforts, and the dimwitted, mindless sheep that make up their audience are more than happy to be recruited because I'm sure it makes them feel like they're doing something. But standing up and shouting at someone is something that petulant third-graders do when they don't get their way, and it only emphasizes the utter desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of their positions.

I'm willing to bet that the majority of those people who stand up and shriek about "socialism" have no idea what the word means. If there is anything in this country that is completely and fundamentally broken and just screams out to be repaired, it is the health care system. Keeping this system in place without reform is probably one of the surest ways to financial disaster this country has ever faced. But these people continue to try to block and frustrate every attempt at defusing this ticking time bomb because their hatred of the President is so all-consuming and blinding. And the only method left to them (because obviously reasoned argument and thoughtful debate are completely incomprehensible, alien options) is juvenile, disrespectful bullying.

Ever since the election last November, the right-wingers have continued to embarrass themselves at every turn. They never will accept of the fact that THEIR CANDIDATE LOST. He is the LOSER. It just irks them to no end that McCain/Palin was such a profoundly loathsome, unattractive combination that the electorate overwhelmingly chose a black president, and they in their thinly-disguised racism hate that so much. It is something that sticks in their collective craws like a big piece of broken glass and will not go away. But expecting conservatives to feel even a little bit of remorse or shame for their disgraceful, childish and hateful actions is like expecting the sun to rise in the west tomorrow - it just isn't going to happen. It is something that in better times would be merely an amusing sideshow, a political Theatre of the Damned or a monstrously bad American Idol audition. But it just so happens that the future of the country is at stake, and we just don't have time for this kind of extreme stupidity.