The Crazy Industry

As I’ve noted earlier, the Republican party is still having a great deal of trouble admitting they are wrong about anything. America tried their toxic formula of redistributing wealth from the middle class to the rich, waging war on women and minorities, and pursuing a chest-beating foreign policy abroad, and after thirty years America said they’ve had enough.

The problem is that The Crazy isn’t just a party, the Republicans. It is also an industry. At the bookstore, there are entire sections dedicated to books generated by the Crazy Industry. Ann Coulter alone has written nine books; Glenn Beck, fourteen books as well as a movie; Dinesh D’Souza, fifteen books and two movies attacking Obama and Michael Moore; Bill O’Reilly, ten books. And many, many more. All attacking Obama, attacking Democrats, attacking liberals.

The Crazy Industry controls a television network, Fox News, not even counting the religious channels with Pat Robertson and the like. They control a number of major newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, and a huge swath of the radio spectrum by means of Rush Limbaugh and his other radio buddies. There is merchandising, fake Confederate flags, wipe-your-ass-on-Obama toilet paper, anti-Obama T-shirts and coffee mugs. The Crazy makes big money: selling ignorance, fear and hate is boffo business.

On the internet, there are a thousand bloggers spewing, and recirculating, hate against Democrats: WND, Breitbart, Drudge, Newsmax, the Examiner. And of course right-wing think tanks, often with wildly-misleading names, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Center for Individual Rights, Family Research Council, etc. Just imagine all the right-wing money needed to fund all these institutions!

They are supplemented by Republican couch potatoes who do nothing all day but re-post Democrat-bashing articles on internet forums, over and over and over. That is pretty much their entire lives, every waking moment they are not eating and pooping. The Crazy Industry is an army of millions.

The Crazy Industry is well-funded. Any Republican who strays from the Crazy Sheet Music on guns gets wiped out by the NRA and its donors; a candidate who gets wobbly on taxes gets carpet-bombed by the supporters of Grover Norquist; any Republican who even looks like he’s thinking about taking a step or two to the left will be primaried out of office by the Club For Growth. Express the notion that abortion should be considered to save the life of the mother and you will get dirty looks from a thousand evangelical ministers and their deep-pocketed flocks.

 

The Crazy Industry. More powerful than the banking Industry, or Big Oil, or Big Tobacco, or Big Pharma.

And it is increasingly a closed system. People who live on the Crazy Planet don’t talk to anyone except other Crazies. Analysts call this “epistemic closure”, which is inaccurate: the phrase actually means something else entirely, to philosophers. But the intent is accurate: the desire by the inhabitants of the Crazy Industry to hermetically seal themselves off from facts, logic, reason, science and reality. This is why arguing with them or even trying to educate them is pointless. They cling bitterly to their delusions like the most determined, unmedicated schizoid. The Democrats have now cornered the market of reality-based thinking, because Republicans have been forced to live on the Crazy Koolaid.

 

All of this we know. The problem with all this, is that the Crazy Industry does not have the same interests as the party that helped create it.

Republican party regulars know that in the real world of politics, the only way to get anything done is to compromise once in a while, and sometimes embrace moderation. But the Crazy Industry insists that since the other team is evil, compromising with them is like negotiating with terrorists, and that it’s better to destroy Democratic accomplishments even if people in the real world are hurt in the process: that is why conservatives are laboring with might and main to undermine Obamacare even though it is hurting their own supporters. Party regulars know that the middle ground is where a lot of progress is made; the Crazy Industry has done all they can to turn the middle ground into a scorched, uninhabitable no-man’s land, and to persecute moderates and “RINO’s” of both parties. The party cries “Victory!” while the discordant Crazies cry, in another key entirely, “Purity!”

Republicans want to control government, but the Crazy Industry wants to destroy it; Republican party regulars occasionally want to accomplish something, but the Crazy Industry wants to see dysfunction so they can complain about it.

The Crazy Industry has always thrived on hate and fear: in the 1980s they scared the dimwits with the Russians, and later they scared them with Usama and Saddam. Now they are frightening their base by using what they call crime, illegals, abortion, uncontrolled sex and immorality, but anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that they are really trying to inspire fear and hate among white people against black and brown people, women and gays who threaten white power and the memories of earlier ages in which those other people knew their place. And all those blacks and browns and women and gays vote, in every-growing numbers. The Republicans can only survive by going brown and getting brown votes; the Crazy Industry has declared war to defend the white against the brown. A nation cannot move forward if their governing ethos is all about destructive hate and fear, but the Crazy Industry cannot survive once the hate and fear subside: spinning up deep, nasty currents of emotion is how the Crazy Industry makes reason impossible and keeps The Crazy in the ascendant.

And as folks like Chris Hayes, Kos and Steve Kornacki have intimated, the Republican party of course wants to win elections, but the Crazy Industry actually thrives on defeat, and the hate and fear which defeat generates. When Democrats win, the Crazy Industry can spew hate against Democratic leaders, their statements, their actions, their policies, and their imagined conspiracies against Traditional America. Their ideal situation is one in which the Republican party is in full retreat before the advancing armies of Obama the wicked communist from corrupt Chicago, Pelosi from the sinful city of San Francisco, Harry Reid from the sinful city of Las Vegas, Bawney Fwank from Massa-taxes. Hating Democrats isn’t enough: the big thing is hating Democrats in power. The Crazy Industry wins when the Republican party loses: they make money selling hate, and hate requires powerful Democratic targets.

The Crazies are a bit like some politicians in parliamentary democracies. They do okay in an opposition role, but as soon as they get anywhere near real power, all hell breaks loose. As Sam Rayburn said, any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a carpenter to build one; America's extreme rightwing has become, ironically, the Jackass Party.

Citizens United was seen as a boon for Republicans. Hooray, the big money boys can spend money on Republican races is obscene quantities, as long as it is not coordinated with the party and the campaigns! And there’s the key problem no one noticed at first, the lack of coordination. A scary metric for Republican politicians: in the 2012 election, most of the money being spent to elect Mitt Romney, was being spent by organizations out of Romney’s control. And those outside groups spewed so many outrageous lies against Obama that the efforts backfired, hurting Romney (of course Romney’s own dishonest ads hurt him too).

The Republican party not only tolerated the rise of the Crazy Industry, they helped create it, and exploited it to win elections. But now the Crazy Industry has become as powerful as the party itself, and has goals which are often in conflict with the interests of the party. And the party has no clear way of regaining control of The Crazy. It’s a bit like the Pakistanis who undertook a great deal of effort to create the Taliban, a bunch of irrational extremists to do their dirty work for them, and then were shocked when their creation, Frankenstein-like, turned on its master.

Undermining same-sex marriage

The war on gays, Vol. 93,526.

Republicans think that the rules are for everybody but them. Whenever they lose a major political battle in Washington, they try to figure out ways to game the system after the fact, in defiance of the Supreme Court, or Congress, or whoever it was who peed in their Cheerios. The high court reaffirms Roe v Wade, and a dozen red states come up with a hundred ways to make it harder for women to get to a clinic. The high court reaffirms Obamacare and governors stamp their feet and vow to stop it. Everybody in the world affirms that women should have access to contraception, and suddenly Christian health-care providers declare that being forced to hand out birth control violates their religious liberty.

And now that gay marriage is taking hold, conservative groups are at it again. They are working across the country, wherever marriage equality is legal, trying to persuade court clerks to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses – all the clerks have to do is declare that “it violates my conscience!” So watch for this crap to take hold in places like Maryland.

The Battle Against Stupid never ends.

Obama's impeachment, 2014

The Republicans in the last few decades have come to the conclusion that they are so obviously right, and the Democrats so obviously wrong, that when Democrats win a presidential election, there must have been something illegitimate about it. The GOP has only managed to break 50 percent once in 24 years of presidential elections – Bush managed a piddly 50.7 percent as a wartime incumbent against a weak opponent – but they still believe that the only way a Democrat could reach the Oval Office is by some evil miscarriage.

So now they are following the same formula as in the Clinton era: try to de-legitimize Obama, and then block everything he tries to pass, and then try to stop his reelection, and then as a last resort, start talking up impeachment. The problem is that Obama’s administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free, one of the most honest administrations in a century.

The Republicans are fishing around for dirty information about Obama’s campaign financing, with no results. They are trying to peddle the idea that Obama has made the economy worse, which the American electorate knows is nonsense: Obama keeps drafting proposals to create jobs and Republicans keep trying to block them for partisan political reasons. And despite that Obama managed to create five million private-sector jobs.

They are trying to raise a lynch mob regarding Obama actions which have already been declared legal in court, such as Obamacare and the individual mandate, and actions which were not only legal but were pursued by Bush and other Republican presidents: recess appointments, executive orders, imprisoning prisoners of war, using weapons to flush out Mexican drug dealers, appointing issue “czars”, and suggesting that the Constitution be altered.

And of course they are trying to breathe new life into conspiracies that have been debunked and laughed out of town, such as voter fraud and ACORN, Obama’s birth certificate, Solyndra, Obama giving “amnesty” to immigrants, Obama establishing an electricity monopoly, Obama rigging the auto bailout in favor of the unions, Obama violating the War Powers act in Libya, a dozen conspiracies regarding Dodd-Frank, and of course Obama stopping help from getting to the Benghazi consulate and lying about it. All of which have been proven untrue, here in the real world.

None of this has any basis in reality. But the fascinating thing is that some of the people yammering about Obama’s non-existent crimes are the same people who eagerly helped cover up the very real crimes of Obama’s predecessor. These rightwing loons cheered as George Bush violated Article I of the Constitution by violating Congress’s prerogatives, by lying to them to get us into a war, blackmailing them into funding unnecessary troop deployments by threatening to put the troops in danger, defying subpoenas, and using illegal signing statements and administrative actions.

These rightwing cheerleaders applauded as Bush committed endless violations of Article II, perverting the executive branch into a partisan political weapon, illegally prosecuting Democratic politicians and firing Democratic attorneys, directing government offices to spread dishonest political propaganda, failing to uphold Article II responsibilities by keeping or financial system safe or enforcing product safety laws, sending thugs to disrupt officials from counting votes while screaming “don’t count the votes!”, and trying to convert the Vice Presidency into a fourth branch of government with no oversight.

They turned a blind eye as Bush repeatedly trampled over Article III by violating the prerogatives of the courts, by defying orders to preserve emails and concealing evidence. Bush’s violations of the Bill of Rights include illegal spying and secret prisons and torture against the innocent, and lying about it all.

And of course they ignored the garden-variety violations of federal law and other high crimes and misdemeanors: Bush killed thousands of innocent people in the Middle East, allowed other terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center without holding them accountable, turned a blind eye as Iran and Korea built the nuclear weapons which could destroy our cities, inflicted so much damage on our military that PTSD and suicide are skyrocketing, made America hated around the world, endangered a CIA employee and intelligence operations by exposing the employee’s identity, made it easier for aliens to enter the country across the Mexican border and through our ports, and put thousands at risk of disease and death after Katrina.

 

So be sure and remind the Issas and Limbaughs of all this when, inevitably, the Impeachment Bandwagon rolls out of the garage in 2014 or thereabouts.

GOP terrified of naked Indian!

Samoa-born Tulsi Gabbard, 31, is a decorated Iraq veteran and martial arts instructor; she achieved a singular distinction for a female warfighter, becoming primary trainer for the ultra-conservative Kuwaiti national guard. She got a business degree and was elected to the Hawaiian legislature at 21, the youngest ever in the nation. She was just elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat, 81 percent to 19. She won by 62 points.

She’s got some serious game.

She is everything Republicans hate: she supports choice for women on abortion and contraception, and same-sex marriage. Unsurprisingly she supports women in combat and works to stop the big banks from foreclosing on deployed troops. And she’s a woman in power, a woman who intensely dislikes bullies; while she was accomplishing all this in her very short life, she also defeated a phone stalker.

And when she is sworn into office this January, she will be sworn in on the Hindu holy book, the Gita, not the Bible. Because she is a devout Hindu.

And this is going to cause some silliness. Five years ago the conservative media went totally crazy when Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison reenacted his oath of office using a Muslim Qur’an, and oddly no sensible person ever asked why a Muslim would ever swear on a Bible. The same year, when a Hindu prayer was said on the Senate floor, rightwing protesters interrupted from the visitors’ balcony, and other conservatives condemned the prayer. It violates the Constitution, the Founding Fathers never would have approved, they don’t believe what we believe, blah blah blah. And of course the wingnuts still insist that Barack Obama is a scary Muslim, even though he was, in fact, the only true Christian in the 2012 presidential race, assuming we’re not counting third parties and the Mormon with his magic stones and magic underwear.

So when Gabbard gets up there with her Gita, expect her to get Fluked by Rush Limbaugh and carpet-bombed with The Crazy by the loony right. Three more choruses of “The Death of Traditional America”. OMG this snake-charming slut from the banks of the Barah-maputra! White Christians, look to your muskets!

By the time they are done, Republicans will have alienated the Hindus in America. All two million of them. Because the wingnuts don’t think they’ve done enough to irritate minorities in America. And the Hindus will remember this in the next election. To make my joy complete, two of the largest concentrations of Hindu worship are in states the Republicans absolutely must retain, if they are to avoid the terrible doom of the Whigs: Florida and Texas.

Personally, I think Gabbard should totally mess with their heads, drive the wingnuts nuts. She should strip naked, ululate in Hindi, sacrifice a goat on the House dais, set it on fire, and then give John Boehner the heart of the goat to eat. Make sure Fox News has their cameras rolling. And then just show up in her red power suit and pearls the next day, like nothing happened.

Is music dead?

Country music today has degenerated into pop with the occasional fiddle, and pop has degenerated into defiantly stupid dance music. And all black music, the source that gave the world blues, jazz, rock and soul, has been sucked into the vortex of rap, which essentially consists of juvenile bathroom-wall poetry over a really really loud drum track. And then singing teenagers from Disney, and contest winners. That is the music of today.

Of all the musicians to come on the scene in the last twenty years, the ten biggest sellers have been the Backstreet Boys, Andrea Bocelli, Rihanna and Beyonce, Eminem and the Black Eyed Peas, Shania Twain, Britney Spears, Spice Girls, and Taylor Swift. How many of their songs will be remembered, decades down the road? “Hit Me One More Time”? “Feel Like A Woman”? “What I Really Want”? “You Belong To Me”?

Ah, yes, I remember our wedding day, twirling on the floor, to our song, “My Humps”.

The second batch of top sellers after them: Robbie Williams, Usher, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Enrique Iglesias, Adele, Jay-Z….and it just goes downhill from there. So, any songs in there that will live forevermore? “Paparazzi”? “Rolling In The Deep”?

Look at the biggest song in each of the last twenty years. The only ones anyone can actually remember are “I Will Always Love You”, “Whoomp There It Is”, the Macarena, “Believe" by Cher, “California Girls” by Katy Perry and the Adele song.

 

Not to get all "get off my lawn" on you people, but compare today's sorry state of affairs to the albums we got just from one year, 1975, with records like Born to Run, Physical Graffiti, Wish You Were Here, A Night at the Opera, Rocky Horror, the Tommy soundtrack and Tubular Bells.

In 1975 we got a pile of great albums from singer-songwriters and the like, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, James Taylor, Carole King, Olivia Newton John, Judy Collins, Harry Chapin, Jim Croce, Joan Baez, John Denver, Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. The former members of CSN&Y produced a total of four albums between them. In one year.

In 1975 the black community unloaded a mountain of music from Parliament, Earth Wind and Fire, the Isley Brothers, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, the Spinners, Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green, the Commodores, the O’Jays, Sly Stone, the Temptations, the Staples, Patti Labelle, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Roberta Flack, and Kool and the Gang. All in one year.

In 1975 there was an explosion of music from the outlaws: Waylon Jennings, the Band, Tom Waits, the Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Feat, the Charley Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Scruggs, the Allman Brothers and ZZ Top.

In 1975 the world of jazz gave us works from Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Weather Report, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Manhattan Transfer, Dexter Gordon and George Benson.

In 1975 the kings of the music world were still cranking it out: three of the four Beatles had albums out, and the Stones, and the Who, and of course Led Zeppelin. The old dinosaurs like the Kinks still had their teeth, and the Hollies, the Four Seasons, Manfred Mann, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, the Beegees, Eric Clapton, and even Elvis Presley.

In 1975, people who wanted to rock out could buy new albums from Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nugent, Grand Funk Railroad, Kiss, Deep Purple, ACDC, Jimi Hendrix (posthumously), BTO, Journey, the Doobie Brothers and Peter Frampton.

In 1975 the old blues guys who started it had albums out, showing everyone how it was done, like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters.

In 1975 progressive rock gave us albums from Renaissance, Kraftwerk, King Crimson, Rick Wakeman, Rush, and Styx.

In 1975 people bought new kinds of music by the ton, from Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Roxy Music, ELO, Supertramp, War, Abba, KC and the Sunshine Band, Rod Stewart and Chicago.

In 1975 David Bowie, Lou Reed and Suzie Quatro warned us that punk and new wave were around the corner; Bob Marley let us know that reggae and world music were coming.

All that in one year. And it was like that through the late sixties and throughout the seventies. Then all these great streams of music seemingly dried up at once, in the 1980s. Rock mocked itself with Nirvana and Hootie and the Blowfish. Soul and R&B died without warning. Hard rock turned into hair metal. Singer-songwriters ran out of things to write. Country lost its balls; the outlaws died off or sobered up, and meanwhile the punks overdosed, or aged into comfortable British commercials for household products. People like Springsteen and Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson tried to keep music alive, but how much original music have they produced in the last decade or so?

Twilight of the wingnuts

Democrats have a great deal to cheer about, quite clearly. Not only did our embattled President win reelection, but the American people, in poll after poll and referendum after referendum, showed that they want Democratic ideas. Affordable health care, GLBT rights, fair taxes on the rich, everything.

But the news is actually better than that. Because the events of the last thirty years were actually the high-water mark of conservative ascendancy.

For most of American history, the conservative movement was divided. The Bible-beating, race-baiting southerners were firmly entrenched in the Democratic party, while the big-business bankers and businessmen were on the other side of the line of scrimmage, first in the Federalist party and the Whigs, and then in the Republican party. Conservatives couldn’t unite because the two wings of the movement were always in two different parties.

Then several things happened, to strengthen the conservative movement.

The big one was the race issue. In 1948 Hubert Humphrey crystallized racial equality as a central issue for the Democratic party, and Truman backed him up. This began to loosen the Democratic party’s grip on the south. In the 1960s the Democrats pushed civil rights legislation. In 1968 George Wallace showed southerners that they didn't always have to cling to the Democratic party, and Nixon openly used a racist appeal to win southerners over to the GOP. By the 1980s the south was turning very red, and former hardcore Democrats like Strom Thurmond, Phil Gramm and Dick Shelby were now Republicans. And what that meant was that the big-business Wall Street conservatives and the southern conservatives, the two main pillars of the right wing movement, were all united. As the southerners joined the GOP, they picked up the powerful NRA too.

Also, the Democratic coalition that dominated America after the Depression collapsed. It was not a gradual decline: it happened all in one summer, due to the short-sighted, destructive actions of one man, George McGovern. In 1972 McGovern wanted to run for president, and came up with an ingenious method for securing the party nomination: taking over as chairman of the Commission on Party Structure and Party Selection, and using the party’s rules to grab the nomination for himself, much the same way Dick Cheney took over Bush’s VP selection process and grabbed the job for himself. But in doing so, McGovern had to launch devastating attacks against the major power centers of the party, the unions and the city bosses. He destroyed their power, and then when he needed their money and manpower  in the general election, they said “you declared war against us at the convention, you destroyed our power, we can’t help you now.” There were other reasons McGovern lost big in 1972 – he embraced the same radical elements that scared the hell out of Middle America in 1968 and he handled his VP selection badly – but the one mistake that had long-term consequences was his deliberate choice to destroy the power centers which the Democrats had used for decades to win elections, the urban machines and big labor.

While the Democratic coalition was collapsing, and the southern and big-business conservatives were uniting under the GOP banner, the conservative alliance was adding a third wing. In 1950 America was reeling from the “loss” of China to the Communists, the news that the Russians had acquired the atom bomb through treachery, the communist invasion of South Korea and the anticommunist jihad of Joe McCarthy, and the Republicans swiftly crafted a “Democrats are weak on foreign policy” meme which helped them win elections throughout the Col dWar, something that really only ended when Obama shot Usama bin Laden in the head.

So now the GOP had an alliance of three strong movements: fiscal conservatives selling sexy tax cuts, social conservatives selling “family values”, and foreign-policy conservatives promising to protect America from the bad guys. And just as important, these three movements learned to support each other: the Wall Streeters learned to sing the “pro-life” sheet music, the war hawks learned to preach the low-taxes gospel.

Then other things happened to help the Republicans. Reagan, a superb salesman with impeccable timing, succeeded where Goldwater had failed sixteen years earlier, in selling the conservative message. Conservatives built their own television network, Fox. They concocted a scheme which put harsh conservative rhetoric on the radio for hours each day across a huge swath of middle America, giving the programming away for free, in exchange for advertising deals and the implied pledge that radio stations wouldn’t add liberal programming – the Rush Limbaugh show. The pushed legislative rules to the limit, filibustering any bills they didn’t like and using that tool to slow the flow of Democratic judges into the federal judiciary, thereby giving the federal bench a far-right tilt. And then they used all those rightwing judges to affirm the right of big-money conservatives to buy elections with millions of dollars in ad money. And lots of mud-slinging and attacks, ranging from Willie Horton to “Obama will kill your grandma”.

So, a Republican party with three strong, mutually-supporting factions, with strong messaging, clever parliamentary tactics, tons of money, and an amazing gift for dishonest attack ads. Facing a Democratic party whose power coalition had fallen apart, and which kept trying, foolishly, to reach out the hand of compromise to Republicans who just wanted to kill them. How could the Republicans lose?

The Republicans lost because America saw them try their ideas out.

They saw America, under Republican leadership, follow the war-hawk foreign policy into an unbelievable quagmire in Iraq. They saw supply-side economics destroying the middle class. They saw what the social conservatives meant when they said “family values” and “traditional America”: a nation in which gays and other minorities were barely tolerated, and women were seen as too stupid to manage their own lives.

And the other tactics failed too. The nasty filibusters began to backfire, the millions of dollars in attack ads backfired, the lies got shot down on live television, nothing the GOP tried worked.

And the amazing thing is how briefly the Grand Coalition of Republican elites lasted at the top of the hill. They won two elections with Reagan, a superb salesman, and then beat Dukakis who was one of the worst campaigners in electoral history. That’s it: three elections.

Since then, the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once in 24 years of presidential politics: Bush, a wartime incumbent running against a lazy opponent, scored a wimpy 50.7 percent. They used scary lies about health care to win the House in 1994 and again in 2010, and they used gerrymandering to keep the House in 2012, even though the Democrats actually got more votes than the GOP in the 2012 House elections. And that's it.

The conservative movement reached its high-tide mark during Reagan, and since then they have had nothing to sustain themselves, but dishonest attacks, fear, hate, unethical tactics, and sheer brass. Once they empty that toolkit, what else do they have? America has rejected their belligerent foreign policy, their rob-the-middle-class-to-feed-the-rich fiscal policy, and their medieval attitudes regarding women, gays and minorities. They can’t win on ideas, they can’t win on strategy and tactics. Their bag of tricks is now empty.

Can the GOP admit their error and save themselves?

Republican leaders are now in a crushing dilemma, on many fronts. The problem they face is that America really likes Democratic policies in a number of areas, once Americans manage to clear away all the Republican scare talk about them and get to the facts.

If Republicans go along with the Democrats on these issues, it means admitting they were wrong, it means they lose issues they can bash the Democrats with, and it means their crazy rightwing base will punish them with primary challenges.

But if they fight the Democrats on these issues, the sane 90 percent of the country will reject them at the polls, they way they just did on election day.

This is playing out on a number of fronts.

On budget policy, the tea-party caucus is pushing John Boehner to defy Obama and take us over the fiscal cliff, which forces the Republicans to reject their low-tax pledges and become the party that raises taxes on the whole country, a toxically bad idea for any Republican who ever wants to run for office. But if Boehner does the sensible thing and negotiates with Obama, his own caucus will fire him and replace him with Cantor or Ryan in a heartbeat, or that woman with three names. Boehner has had to deal with this push-pull ever since he became Speaker: that’s what happens when your leader can’t lead.

On Obamacare, it is becoming more and more obvious that Americans really do want the provisions in the plan, getting affordable care, preventing insurance corporations from chucking you out when you get too old or have a preexisting condition. Republican governors are trying to screw with implementation  of the program, because they hope it will deprive Obama of a historic victory, but it will also anger a lot of voters by taking away affordable health care. So do they admit that their three years of scare tactics about dead grandmothers were a load of crap, and stop fighting it? Or continue to resist changes that the voters want?

On foreign policy, Romney realized too late that trying to fight Obama on foreign policy was going to lead him straight into quicksand, and a public spanking by Candy Crowley. After that scarring experience, Romney simply agreed with all of Obama’s foreign policies while also attacking Obama as a failure on foreign policy, which fooled nobody. So now, as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis cranks up yet again, the Republicans are in a jam: how can they criticize Obama for following the same pro-Israel policy that every President since Truman has pursued? The funniest thing about Republican foreign policy is that, as hard as they try to sound like street-corner badasses ready to fight Iran, they have totally failed to see the hand of Iran in what is going on in Israel. This is a pattern that has played out many times over the last thirty years: whenever the international community puts pressure on Iran, the same thing happens – the world is suddenly distracted by the eruption of new violence further west. An explosion of civil conflict in Lebanon, then the intifada, then Palestinian shelling of Israel, again and again. All concocted by the Iranians. And the Republicans, instead of correctly hollering at one of their favorite targets, Iran, insists on hollering at Obama instead, for doing….exactly what they would have done.

Even on the election itself. Republicans have been hollering for a week that Obama won the election on a foul, by promising illicit goodies to gullible, greedy, lazy women and blacks and Latinos. But in 2014 and 2016 the party will need to win over those same gullible, greedy, lazy groups, who aren’t stupid and will surely remember these post-election insults. So do the Republicans blame minorities for screwing up the 2012 election, or begin sucking up to them for 2016? They can’t do both. And in fact they may not be able to do either: nobody really believes the “minorities wrecked the election” meme except the wingnuts, and minorities and women are not going to fall for any Republican snake-oil salesmen in 2016, even if the two people hopping out of the snake-oil wagon are Piyush Jindal and Nikki Haley. Romney, who will never run again, stuck to the “minorities ruined everything” meme, but many big party players who do have further electoral ambitions slapped him down for insulting minorities. And this makes it easier for us to figure out who is most desperate to exploit these groups for future elections: some of the most vociferous violators of the “thou shalt not criticize fellow Republicans” rule, spanking Romney for being mean to brown people, are Chris Christie, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, Nikki Haley…

So now Republicans must decide whether they would rather admit they were wrong, and lose elections. Or stick to their guns and try to destroy all of the popular policies that Obama ran on, and lose elections that way.

This isn’t the first time the Republicans have been in this jam. For most of the last century, the American people wanted Democratic policies. So Republicans had to figure out a way to champion the same policies as Democrats, while attacking the Democrats who had championed them first. “I agree with everything my opponent wants to do, and if we elect him it will be a disaster for America!” Eisenhower got away with campaigning as a “New Deal Republican” because he was Eisenhower. Nixon tried the same thing in 1960 and was branded as a laughable purveyor of “me-too-ism”: Nixon only won when he sang the racist sheet music to a temporarily terrified nation in 1968, running against a divided Democratic party.

And now, the Democratic hand is arguably stronger than it was forty years ago. As Ulysses Grant once said, sometimes the only way to kill a bad idea is to try it out. So for the better part of thirty years we tried out Reagan’s Laffer-curve supply-side trickle-down strategy for giving trillions to millionaires and hoping they’d give it all back, and unsurprisingly it was a disaster. Only when Clinton steered us back to the left did we get the ship back on an even keel and create twenty million jobs. So now America knows: we’ve seen both parties run the economy, and we know that the Democratic path leads to jobs and growth.

But when will the Republicans admit it?

More on secession

A masterpiece from Bob Cesca on the lunacy of threatening secession, and the dirty secret that the people who are whining about half the country consisting of imaginary black and brown freeloaders, are actually very real white freeloaders. They’re just trying to shove the black and brown people away from the pig trough so they can secure their own slop supply. So, here’s Bob:

“There would be a massive refugee crisis of non-secessionists flooding out of the secessionist states. They'd be the smart ones….Most of the red states had heretofore taken more federal aid than they paid back in federal taxes. South Carolina, for example, takes $1.35 in federal money for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. Louisiana takes $1.78. Talk about moochers and freeloaders. After secession, that gravy train would cease to exist. Farmers, corporations, small businesses, universities and law enforcement would crumble without federal aid -- grants, contracts, matching funds, tax breaks, etc. It's likely the power grid, pipelines, shipping lanes and, yes, satellite and internet communications would be summarily blocked by the U.S. government. The confederacy would be totally cut off from the rest of the world. How would northern medical equipment and pharmaceuticals reach the seceded states? Black-marketeers would spring up in every town….States would end up splitting into smaller and smaller pieces with parts of states seceded from other parts -- subdividing and subdividing until the confederacy vaporized or was reunified into a more traditional federalist system….If you're on Social Security -- gone. If you're on Medicare -- gone. Hell, if you rely on the internet to do business -- gone. And you should be prepared to wage war against the most powerful military in the history of mankind.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/secession-obama-2012_b_2138541.html

So these morbidly obese elderly rednecks will proudly hang their Confederate flags on their trailers, and then waddle out to their mailboxes to get their federal government Medicare checks and their federal government Social Security checks. But the checks won’t be there. In fact no mail will be there, because mail delivery is a federal government service. They lose the VA, FEMA, maintenance on the interstate, school lunches, college loans, small business loans, mortgages, unemployment. A lot of their food will be pricey because it will be imported.

They will lose their military power. Think of it! The bellicose Foghorn Leghorn leaders in the south will fulminate about evil Muslims, and then they will have no military tools to do anything about it. The south might grab a few bases, but without the equipment, money and spare parts flowing into those installations, those bases will close quickly, and their civilian personnel, the backbone of most bases, will quit and go north. A few soldiers will quit the U.S. Army to join the southern army, but why would anyone want to quit the greatest army in world history, to join a puny, under-resourced southern force that will never matter in the real world? If the south had to take on even a puny country like Cuba in a war, they would lose. The south will cease to matter at all, on the world stage.

They will lose corporate America. A few corporations are based down south, but even they need the markets of the north to stay alive. The big banks, the big insurance companies, the major industries, transportation, publishing, entertainment, the tech sector, are overwhelmingly in the north and will stay there. The north will remain the preeminent economic and fiscal superpower in the world. The south, deprived of all that economic muscle, deprived of all that financing, will atrophy. They will become the Greece of the Western Hemisphere. Latin Americans will laugh at them. Only oil revenue will prevent immediate fiscal collapse.

The UN will add the Confederacy to their list of independent nations. And they will list the Confederacy near the bottom for poverty, income, unemployment, life expectancy, cancer rates, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, health care, violent crime, divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, teen pregnancy, education. Overall they will be somewhere between Mexico and Costa Rica if they’re lucky.

Lawmaking will take off like a rocket in both countries. The real America, the north, east and west, will wave goodbye to all those southern obstructionists and pass laws on climate change, immigration, health care, Middle East policy, gays, and Wall Street reform. But down in the Confederacy: banning abortion and contraception, pulling brown-skinned people over to check their papers, banning evolution and climate change from the schools, privatizing schools and police service and fire service and health care so everything is cash on the barrelhead and only the rich can live normal lives, thus causing anyone with half a brain to flee the south for the north.

The worst thing that can happen to a conservative, is to see the mess that ensues when their crazy ideas are actually implemented.

 

Obama kills the Twinkie!

Chyron at the bottom of Fox News: OBAMA ATTACKING YOUR CHILDREN?

“Are the cameras all rolling? Is the mike hot? Good! This is Senator John McCain, talking to America from the Senate Press Gallery, yet again – hey, kid, never ever get between me and a camera!...And I am here today, to warn you of yet another Obama scandal that is rocking the nation. Something which will be a tragedy for little children all across this great land of ours. THE WAR ON TWINKIES. It is obvious to a child of ten, that this dastardly attack on one of our most cherished childhood foods, has been masterminded, behind closed doors, in the dark of night, by an evil conspiracy of union thugs, and their arugula-eating stooges in the Obama administration. INCLUDING OBAMA HIMSELF. All this talk from the First Lady about eating healthy foods – coincidence? I don’t think so! We intend to bypass the established Senate Committees and set up a Special Select Committee just to address this Twiknie crisis, and stock it with the loudest, most annoying Republican camera-hog Senators we can find. Then we will bring out our most rabid House tea-party members to really light up the screen, led by Darrell Issa and his impeachment managers. We’ll go after Biden too, and make John Boehner our President! Slide that tanning bed right into the Oval! And now here’s a recap of Rush Limbaugh’s emergency broadcast on this scandal….”

Don’t laugh. Because a Republican jihad over Twinkies would be no more fallacious than their current Benghazigate frenzy over a diplomat who merely repeated the talking points the CIA gave her, just like Condy Rice did before her.

The truth about Twinkiegate is that vulture capitalists of the Romney variety have taken over the Twinkie parent company, and decided to sell off the Hostess assets and throw the workers out of the factories, regardless of what happened in talks with the workers. Along the way they suddenly quadrupled the salaries of senior managers just before declaring bankruptcy, which in more enlightened times would be called theft. They picked a fight with their workers, demanding cuts in pay and benefits which they knew the workers couldn’t afford, and then blamed the evil unions for destroying the company. So prepare to see more of this: firms destroying their workers’ lives and then blaming the workers for refusing to work for pennies a day. It’s not a bankruptcy: it’s a permanent lockout.

So Twinkiegate really is a scandal after all. Republicans busting out a company like the Gambinos busting out a mobbed-up restaurant, stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, firing all the cooks, and setting the place on fire. The kind of future guys like Romney envision for all of America. What if he had won?

Terrorism at your local restaurant!

Papa Johns, Dennys, Applebees – "we will raise prices and fire people, because of Obama and Obamacare!". Typical Republican corporate thugs – screw over the little guy, and then blame in on the Preisdent who is trying to protect the little guy. Kinda like a terrorist killing hostages, and then blaming America or Israel for not giving him everything he wants. What’s the difference between this Papa John nonsense, and some whackaloon shooting up a school and shouting “This is Obama’s fault!” as the cops blow him away?

Freak out Republicans with The Gay

Want to make the Republicans totally freak out?

Make Tammy Baldwin the president pro tempore of the Senate, when she takes office in January.

If tragedy strikes, and Obama, Biden and Boehner all die, we will have the first gay president.

Or rather, the first openly gay president. The jury is still out on James Buchanan.

Can you imagine Sean and Rush and Michelle Bachmann and Pat Robertson and the Westboro boys, faced with the prospect of a gay president?

Better yet? Win the House back in 2014 and appoint Kyrsten Sinema Speaker – a bisexual woman two heartbeats away from the Oval Office. And then have her marry Baldwin on the Senate floor.

Because we know gay people give Republicans the heebie jeebies. One of our greatest pleasures was watching Republicans screw themselves into the ceiling any time Barney Frank dared to speak out on anything. This seventy-year-old gay Jew chatting amiably about his boyfriend. Ewww! Cooties!

Benghazi, Rice and McCain

 

In the spirit of the autumnal season, let’s talk turkey about Benghazi, Susan Rice and her puny tassel-loafered tormentors on the Hill. Let’s begin with a brilliant quote.

"A great American success story. This is what America is all about. A young woman who grew up in a segregated part of America where Americans were not treated equally, to rise to the position of secretary of state. We should have been celebrating, I believe, this remarkable American success story. Also, I thought that some of the remarks, and I’m not going to mention my colleagues’ names, some of the remarks aimed at her during the hearings challenged her integrity. We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign. I hope it dissipates soon. I can only conclude we’re doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness at the outcome of the elections."

John McCain, defending Rice’s State nomination, January 2005. Condoleezza Rice, that is. And defending her infamous, inaccurate statements about Iraqi nukes, aluminum tubes, and mushroom clouds.

Another quote.

"Every intelligence agency in the world was misled. And to connect those two to say that she’s a liar is very unfair, over the line."

That’s Lindsey Graham, defending Condy Rice eight years ago.

Incidentally, if the Republicans want to use performances on Meet The Press as the metric to measure fitness for office, let’s remember that John McCain goes on the show almost every week, and during the Iraq war he was regularly parroting Bush administration talking points that were outright lies. No one bellowed more loudly than McCain when Republicans were singing from the "Mushroom Cloud Yellow Cake Torture Is Good" sheet music. It would be very, very easy to put together a "McCain Says Stupid Stuff to David Gregory" blooper reel. So if getting the facts wrong on Meet The Press is a hanging offense, McCain should have been sent back to Arizona in disgrace years ago.

　

Second, guys like McCain and Graham are whining that Rice shouldn’t be confirmed because she failed to rein in the obstructive excesses of the Russians and the Chinese at the UN. There are so many things wrong with this that I hardly know where to start. But here goes.

The Bush team categorically failed to counteract the obstructions of Russia and China at the UN during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. John Negroponte, Bush’s representative at the UN, completely failed to overcome that obstacle. Did McCain and the other Republicans condemn him and ruin his career? Amazingly, no. They rewarded him by making him our ambassador to Iraq, and then Director of National Intelligence.

The reason no one busted Negroponte for that, is that the Russians have always been obstructive at the UN. They’ve been doing it since the UN was formed. The only reason the UN took action in Korea in 1950 is because Russia’s UN representative had walked out in a huff, so he wasn’t there to veto the UN police action in Korea.

Also, McCain and Graham are part of the most obstructive Senate party caucus in the history of the Republic. They have launched or threatened filibusters more than any group in U.S. history. To include, of course, their threatened obstruction of any nomination for Susan Rice. If there is anybody out there who should just shut the hell up about deliberate obstruction for political purposes, it’s these two clowns, and the rest of Mitch McConnell’s "Doctor No" chorus.

　

Third, as for the actual issue driving all this, the Benghazi attack, here are the facts which the Republicans don’t want you to know.

Terrorists around the world have made it patently clear that killing Americans is among their chief goals. America has about three hundred embassies and consulates around the world. Every one of them is a terrorist target. Then add all of the diplomatic personnel around the world, most of whom live outside the embassy; then add all our military personnel around the world, and our tourists, and our businessmen. Giving all these people perfect round-the-clock protection is a logical impossibility. Eventually, the terrorists are going to get a win. Eventually, they will kill. When you hear little Lindsey Graham leaping out of his little satin socks, screeching that he holds Obama "ultimately responsible" for the deaths of our personnel, ask him whether his puny little brain is willing to assign any of that responsibility to, you know, the terrorists who actually killed them. Or to the Republicans in Congress who cut funding for embassy security.

Contrary to all the conspiracy theorists who insist that Obama and Clinton prevented help from getting to Benghazi, Obama had the CIA response going within twenty four minutes, which is positively miraculous, and the first military unit responded shortly thereafter. There were limits to what they could accomplish because some military units were too far away, and other units, particularly the ones involving air support, could do little because of the constricted urban environment and the risk of heavy civilian casualties and other collateral damage. Again, sometimes the bad guys win, no matter how you prepare. Or don’t prepare (see Bush and his refusal to listen to terror warnings before 9/11).

The people screeching for Obama to be impeached because four Americans died on his watch, are the same people who cheered like madmen for Bush who lost three thousand on 9/11 and four thousand in Iraq, all killed by terrorists. It never ceases to amaze me: when Americans die on the Republicans’ watch, it’s really the Democrats’ fault for not supporting the President and the troops enough. When people die on the Democrats’ watch, the Democrats did it wrong, no matter what actually happened. You can always count on the Republicans to exploit the tragic deaths of innocent Americans for cheap political purposes.

　

Fourth, our old friend McCain. We could do a whole aria on Lindsey Graham, the poor lad who was dogged by homosexual rumors and tried to prove his manliness by getting into a macho impeachment contest with Big Bill the Sex Machine. But this new fight is really all about McCain.

Just to make clear how totally un-serious McCain is about all this. McCain has been demanding meetings to gather information about this terrible Benghazi scandal. So they set up the meeting. Did McCain go? No. He blew off the meeting so that he and Graham could hold yet another press event and screech about filibustering against Susan Rice, who hasn’t even been nominated yet. As the Red Queen would have said, outrage first, facts afterwards! A reporter asked McCain about the meeting he skipped, and McCain flipped out.

Other Republicans are starting to roll their eyes at McCain’s antics. A Republican Senator privately criticized McCain for all this hotdogging, and McCain’s office was forced to blame his absence from the information meeting on a scheduling mistake. When McCain demanded a special committee to investigate Benghazi, a committee which presumably would allow him to fulminate about Democratic treason on national TV, even Susan Collins, a fellow Republican, muttered publicly that the Senate already has two different committees which could do the job just fine.

Poor Johnny. Like Nixon before him, McCain has an almost Shakespearean capacity for self-destruction, getting involved in five disastrous aviation accidents despite only flying twenty-three combat missions, the instability, the temper, the suicide attempts, the infidelity, the constant embarrassing quest for love and attention, the dirty campaigns and contributions, the disgusting insults aimed at Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno, and the repellent effort to loyally clean up Bush’s messes after Bush insulted his family. And of course the psychotic episode in which he chose Sarah Palin to sit one heartbeat away from the Commander-in-Chief’s chair despite being an elderly man with serious cancer problems, the erratic behavior during the 2008 financial crisis, and then losing to that colored whippersnapper in 2008 despite being in the lead in mid-September.

Now, after galloping across the national landscape for decades, like a mad jackass with a bee up its ass, McCain’s reign of tragicomedy is almost over. If he runs for the Senate again in 2016, he will be 80 years old, making less sense than ever, if the Latino vote doesn’t turn him out of office. And he knows he’s the sad-faced circus clown who tried to stay in the center ring just a bit too long. A great statesman in his own mind, he is running out of chances to persuade America to take him seriously. His jihad against Susan Rice, who didn’t even have any connection to the disaster in Benghazi, puts one in mind of William Jennings Bryan, who fell short in three presidential races, and by the end of his life was reduced to persecuting a skinny little schoolteacher for teaching evolution in a high school, a would-be dragon-killer reduced to fighting smaller and smaller dragons.

The Confederate flag?

The yahoos in the red states, horrified at the prospect of having a black president for another four years, are starting a national movement to secede from the union, to punish Obama for being really really black, or something. And a number of their sites on the internet are posting pictures of the Confederate flag.

Or rather, the flag that they think is the Confederate flag.

You know, the red rectangular field, blue Saint Andrew’s cross, thirteen stars on the cross? The one you can buy at the mall?

That flag, which for convenience we will call the “mall flag”, isn’t the Confederate flag. And it’s not the Stars And Bars.

The Confederacy had three “national” flags, and the mall flag wasn’t any of those three. The first of those three national flags was the real Stars And Bars. It looked a lot like the American flag: three big red and white horizontal stripes, and a blue bit in the corner with stars on it.

The flag that rednecks buy at your local mall and hang off their trailers and their F150s is not any of the three “national” Confederate flags. It is the flag of the Army of Tennessee, the army that was spanked by the Union in their aborted invasion of Kentucky, and then spanked in Tennessee, and again in Georgia, and in Tennessee again, and in Carolina, until finally they had to surrender. While Robert E. Lee was dazzling the military historians of the world leading the Confederate forces in the eastern theater, the men marching under that mall flag further to the west were being pounded to jelly. It was because of that army with the mall flag that Georgia was devastated; that was the flag that was being torn down in Atlanta, just before the fires started. It was the incompetence of the mall-flag army that made Grant and Sherman into national rock stars. Except for the chaotic mess at Chickamauga, that mall-flag army never won a major battle, and the only reason they even won at Chickamauga is that Lee sent a big chunk of his own army to help them out.

Today’s rednecks think that the flag they’re flying represents the bravery and the gallantry of the southern spirit. But in reality, the mall flag represents one subsection of the southern army, that got their butts kicked over and over for almost three years. That flag represents repeated, embarrassing defeat – it’s like flying the flag of the Detroit Lions, or that fake team that gets beat by the Harlem Globetrotters every time.

And the mall flag represents something else, and I don’t just mean, you know, the whole thing about glorifying slavery, and wrecking the whole country when you don’t get your way on a political issue. For a solid century, these people openly and bitterly resisted any attempt to deprive them of their favorite Saturday night entertainment: finding an innocent black man, beating him and hanging him from a tree. And then making it all a big party so the kids could watch and learn too. They even laughed and took pictures. These same people regularly go on the internet today and express the wish that they could do the same to our Commander In Chief. In other words, it represents the American Taliban: these guys would be perfectly at home with the Afghans who throw acid in the faces of uppity girls who want to learn to read. And that's why southerners fly the wrong flag: they know it's the flag that terrifies blacks and aggravates anyone with an IQ above room temperature. It's the flag that proclaims the one right no one can take from them: the Constitutional right to be a public asshole.

And in its current context, the mall flag represents a region which is dragging the Republican party down the slippery slope into oblivion. A region which lags behind the rest of the nation, and indeed the rest of the civilized world, in education, health, teen pregnancy, life expectancy, infant mortality, workers’ rights, violent crime, poverty, unemployment, dependence on government welfare, and contribution to the national tax base. Once again, that mall flag represents embarrassing defeat, due to native pigheadedness, ignorance, fear and hate. Just like 1861.

Southern pride!

A week later, the GOP still in denial

Tuesday evening, half past six.

Exactly a week ago, Republicans were chilling the champagne in the clubhouse, waiting for Indiana and Kentucky to come up first and start Romney on his unstoppable march to 270, with $25,000 worth of fireworks ready to be fired at Romney headquarters after the inevitable win. Romney didn’t even prepare a concession speech.

And then….the Republicans are still not sure what happened next. Obama wins, even in Florida, we have a gay Senator, gay marriage, legal pot. Nightmare!

So it’s a week later, and I put on my hazmat suit and visited the conservative part of the internet, to see if the Republicans have finally figured out that America really, really doesn’t like them.

Um, no. They are still stuck in the Denial Vortex and haven’t managed to Elizabeth-Kubler-Ross their way to the next stage. So far, their excuses for losing are as follows.

First, immorality! The big guns like this one best. Rush is whining about food stamps, amnesty for criminals, emasculated men, pop culture leading America into the gutter. O’Reilly moans about drugs, abortion, homosexuality, handouts for moochers. Breitbart bellows that we won the cold war but the communists won the peace. They are really giving their code-word manual a workout:

Food stamps = black

Amnesty = brown

Abortion = women

Mooching Socialist = Democrat

…and traditional = white. The real Americans! The moral ones!

Next, Obama cheated! Several outlets are hollering that the “inner city” stole the election: Fox, Hannity, Rush, Breitbart, World Net Daily. Philadelphia is a key target for baseless accusations of voter fraud, the continuing subtext being that the black vote is somehow illegitimate. Even their vice presidential  candidate is muttering about the “urban vote”. All those dog whistles were causing a serious ringing in my inner ear.

Next, our tactics sucked! Hannity and Rush grumble that Obama’s dirty campaign of lies worked too well and the GOP blew the race by trusting Romney, Rove and guys like Akin to campaign competently. Because there’s no way Obama could win an honest election.

Next, Rush and Sean insist that conservatism didn’t lose, we should ignore minorities and go further to the right. And some of their more hysterical allies want to secede. But never, ever give in. As Mitch McConnell made clear, they equate compromising with Democrats, with negotiating with terrorists. Because anyone who disagrees with them is The Enemy.

Next, Benghazi! For four long years the wingnuts have searched in vain for a bona fide Obama scandal. They fell on their faces with the birth certificate and Eric Holder. Now conservatives are ignoring the one big news story, the fiscal cliff, in favor of the other big one, the Benghazi-Petraeus Vortex, because it’s their one big chance to use “Obama!” and “Illicit sex!” in the same sweat-dripping headlines. Fox, Drudge, Newsmax, everyone is on this, not only because of “Obama!” and “Sex!” but because it allows them to keep up the pretense that they are covering a real news story that sane grownups are also reporting. Three horny men, two horny women, dead diplomats, and Obama! Who will play them in the Lifetime movie??

So, there’s the answer from the right. “We didn’t really lose! Obama ran a dirty campaign and rounded up the votes of the 47 percent of America who are degenerate moochers, and our tactics weren’t up to snuff! We just need to be more conservative and attack Obama even more!” A few of their saner leaders are mumbling about negotiating on immigration, but they are being drowned out.

As I said earlier, they didn’t get the message on election day. They will need to be hit in the head again and again until they get it.

Obama makes America #1 in oil production

According to the International Energy Agency, the United States will pass Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the top oil producer in the world, achieving more energy self-sufficiency than ever, as of 2017, just as Obama is leaving office. Bush sought energy self-sufficiency by invading the Middle East and it was a disaster. Obama tried it by expanding domestic production and succeeded. Remember this the next time some knuckle-dragging Republican screams that Obama is weak on energy, drill baby drill, stop being mean to Exxon, etc etc.

Republicans retaliate by...trying to secede

Within hours of Florida providing the final score for Obama’s election victory, citizens from twenty different states sent the White House petitions for permission to secede. Twenty! There are so many stupid things about this that I can’t possibly address them all. So I’ll just do two.

First. Since when is losing an election grounds for secession? When the Republicans illegally tossed thousands of minorities off the voter rolls in Florida in 2000, physically stopped election officials from counting votes, and stole  the election by means of one Supreme Court Justice with an admitted conflict of interest, and proceeded to steer Bush’s illegal presidency into illegal wars, illegal torture, illegal detention, illegal firings of inconvenient prosecutors….did California and New York say “screw it, we’re starting a new country!”? Of course not. Because liberals respect the process even when we lose, because we’re freakin’ grownups. This is like the Oakland Raiders throwing a hissy fit and leaving the NFL just because the Ravens spanked them fair and square.

And second. Most of the states trying to secede are the usual suspects, in the deep south, and in the E-I-E-I-O states in the middle of nowhere. Red states. And this is the terrible secret that the red-staters don’t want you to know: the red states are net consumers of federal money. Every day, every month, every year, money flows from taxpayers in the blue states to all the couch-potato redneck rubes out in Limbaugh land, the semi-literate dropouts who can’t get work, the retirees who stopped thinking coherently around the time of Nixon and Reagan – they are all the consumers of welfare programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Which means that if they secede, they freakin’ starve. And incidentally these are programs which Obama, the winner, is trying to protect: it is Team Red that is trying to dismantle these programs which are keeping the red states from turning into Somalia. These clowns would rather commit suicide than accept a scary black man beat a white guy.

Stupid is as stupid does.

 

And by the way, third. We already went through this secession crap once. With the same people. We spanked them because we outnumbered them, we were smarter, and we were right and they were wrong. None of which has changed.