Mitt Romney is the president of white male America …
Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional??? America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.
Forty years ago, reprinted from Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72:
Hear me, people. We now have to deal with another race — small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. — Sitting Bull, 1877
The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with election day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we now seem on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself …
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality — the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts — that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of the century,” bur on a level he will never understand he was probably right … and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. — Hunter Thompson
Below, the plentiful evidence of widespread self-delusion and the corrosive legacy of Norman Vincent Peale.
Pay the pearl-clutchers no mind. That way lies disaster. The actual fine print on the label of reality reads: “Kumbaya” not included.
Morning after snapshot of country vote analysis by the Los Angeles Times.
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party bet on the New Confederacy and lost in an electoral college landslide.
In the process, they played on the basest feeling, loathing, rallying the middle-aged white voter against everyone else. The result is that everyone in the world can’t help but see the US as two countries, one that’s old fearful, motivated only by lies and anger, and one ready to try to deal with the present.
Your country has been polarized and an incredible amount of arms [are] in private hands.
These two facts alone are enough to do everything one can to deescalate.
In my opinion the quote “elections don’t change anything, otherwise they’d be forbidden??? holds true.
The US is reigned by capitalism and Obama’s reelection doesn’t change that.
You yourself have on this blog never even mentioned, that other parties exist in your country, probably for fear that democrat voters are more likely to think about their choice and thus would weaken Obama’s chances.
But a two party system imho doesn’t offer a real choice if it exists for a longer period of time. Even less so if it gets trampled on:
I think Taibbi is right, when he thinks about conciliation rather than fighting it to the grave. Especially when you remind yourself, that you would have to fight against intellectually challenged white supremacists who live in selfmade bunkers.
Indeed, Christopher Hechl has a point. I never mentioned any third party runs. Roseanne Barr, the famous tv sitcom actress, was on the ballot in Pasadena. And so was Jill Stein of the Green Party.
And much earlier in the year an organization funded by centrist hedge fund managers called Americans Elect tried to mount a third party campaign. Americans Elect was ignored, I believe rightly so, being more of the same rich man’s business. And Jill Stein of the Green Party had a hard time getting the mainstream media to cover her even when she was getting arrested as a publicity stunt.
The truth is third party runs have been rendered impossible. And it’s because of money.
Everyone has noticed the plutocrats funneled hundreds of millions into the extreme right’s campaign in an attempt to remove Barack Obama. They didn’t choose to start a new party. They bought one off the shelf, the Tea Party, in a concerted campaign that started prior to the 2010 election.
There are many lists now circulating of the biggest winners and losers from the election; oddly, however, none of the lists I’ve seen mentions just how bad this result is for Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe.
The story, as you may recall, is that the financial industry — having brought both itself and the rest of the world to the edge of disaster — was bailed out by taxpayers. Yet far from being grateful, top financial types were furious at Obama for occasionally hinting that some of them might have misbehaved a bit. And investment bankers — who normally lean Democratic — went overwhelmingly to the other side, pouring cash into Mitt Romney’s coffers in the no doubt correct expectation that a Romney administration would dismantle financial reform and treat their wealth with the adulation they believe to be their birthright.
But Romney lost and Obama won. The limits of their power have been cruelly exposed, and the reelected president now owes them nothing.
There was also a lot of air time wasted last night on how the country must be stitched back together.
It can’t. Those who call for it, like Tom Brokaw, seemingly whenever he was on camera on NBC last night, have brains not fit for cheap canned dog food. The map at the LA Times shows it very plainly.
The New Confederacy bet won all the votes in the south and in the big wasteland states with very small populations. That’s the angry white man, what this blog calls the Psychopath Vote. And it lost everywhere else, in the cities where polyglot America lives.
One sees it in California. It looks like two states. One that doesn’t count, in the interior. And the other California, the one Republicans like to mock, where most of us live, near and on the coast.
Even San Diego county went for the president. The military, it looks to me, trusted him more to steer the country right than the always war drum beating xenophobe anti-Muslim hawks.
Look close along the mighty river bordered by the bright red states — Mississippi. Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s all blue. That’s where the Americans the bigots hate live.
They live in the big blue strip along the southern border of Texas and it shows everybody that eventually, sometime in the future — maybe not anytime soon, the Republicans — even in Texas — will be finished.
That’s the present and the future coming.
Oysters take an irritant, sand, and turn it into something wonderful — pearls. That won’t happen in the United States. There won’t be anything good that transforms out of the vast expanse of irritant fighting mad red. It will just get less so. The inexorable long march of time will dispose of the modern GOP.
The election won’t correct anything. The Republicans will persist in going after all their imagined enemies, denying science, trying to impose control on the reproductive rights of women, jamming up everything where they can, damning gay people and loudly proclaiming how they are the makers and everyone else, swine. Many of them have already proclaimed the election an historic world tragedy.
The parasites won! The election result only confirms this ugly paranoid belief — the Democratic strategy is to make as many people as possible a government dependent, a moocher, and in so doing cultivate a voting base that outnumbers the “producers.”
It’s a horrible slur to regard over half the country as nothing. But it’s their encapsulated delusion and nothing can change it.
Expect more of the same from the Republicans. Love is transitory. Hate is forever.
“For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the ‘real America,’ all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people … Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way,” wrote Krugman in a similar vein.
I called it Guns, Booze & Jesus. And it’s a nasty, mean hard rock tune, unlikely to get that generous spirit of Norman Vincent Peale-ism swelling in the breast of the listener. But that’s exactly how what lost last night is.
The New Confederacy was stillborn. Not for lack of trying, though. Mitt Romney and the billionaires made the cynical and loathsome decision to polish white animosity to the sharpest serrated edge that could be managed in a long presidential campaign. Sure, that animus was always there. However, they made it everything, turning it into the biggest, baddest, most damaging brand they could. And they came up short.
Even at the bitter end, Mitt Romney still wasn’t able to be magnanimous in defeat. He emphasized he and his wife would pray for the Obama administration and the country. They would pray for all of us. In the extremist Republican lexicon, you are prayed for because you are thought flawed, unclean, a sinner who may fall. The quality of faith is most insincere.
Decency and the forward look was triumphant. However, the rancid toothpaste won’t be going back in the tube. It’s what we have now.
I would have paid a movie fare to see the blood squirt from the corners of Ted Nugent’s eyes like a Texas horned toad before the man collapsed in a heap on the floor in Waco. I have heard Nugent is on an obscure Turkish painkiller called Wallot to control the agony of exploding kidney stones from decades of over-consumption of fatty hog meat and diet soda. Wallot can loosen inhibitions leading to crazy outbursts of reptile-like hissing and subsequent unconsciousness.
And, yes, he did manage to call everyone who voted for Obama a subhuman varmint. The hate is still strong within him.
Good news, lads, good news! Walmart is the best agency to respond to superstorms, calamitous climate brought on by global warming, and earthquakes, too, probably.
Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
There can be no reasoning with people who cannot accept any truth in the world when it goes against their ideologies.
From today’s WaTimes, Big government intervention not needed for natural disasters:
While it is true that FEMA under President George W. Bush responded to Katrina with, to borrow a term from Mr. Obama, a “suboptimal??? performance, the burden of first response should have been shouldered by Louisiana. The media obsessively scrutinized FEMA’s sclerotic emergency management, neglecting the unheralded heroes of that crisis: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi …
Similarly, the unsung protagonist of the Hurricane Irene disaster was the private sector: Retailers like Walmart and Home Depot reapportioned their resources, at considerable cost to themselves, to funnel supplies to those who needed them most. Let’s lob a rhetorical question back at the editors of the Times: Does anybody really think the federal government would be more efficient in responding to a natural disaster than a local Walmart?
Walmart? One is rendered speechless.
How do you even pitch that idea to an opinion page unless every one of the editors and all the readers are insane?
“I’m going to argue that Walmart is better for dealing with catastrophic acts of God than government!” Wild applause.
“Emergency budgets,” the writer opines, “predictably expand like a rising yeast.” The “collective vigilance” of the people is needed to stop it.
The enemy, and why the result tomorrow is utterly critical.
I try to read the WaTimes opinion page a few times a week. It gives you a comprehensive grasp of the extremists and their audience built on hate speech. It is the DC Republican power structure’s newspaper, where they go first to get their severe philosophies top billing. So if Guns, Booze & Jesus maddens, it is the place for your comfort.
President Obama must be defeated on Tuesday. Our republic hangs in the balance. A second term would enable him to achieve his seminal goal: the transformation of America into a European social democracy. The nation of our Founding Fathers will cease to exist. Our constitutional system will be replaced by a corporatist superstate based on arbitrary, centralized power and the fusion of big government, big business and big labor …
We are becoming a nation of economic deadbeats and social parasites. Mr. Obama has forged a new redistributionist order: Tax consumers are devouring the wealth of taxpaying producers. In the process, he is breeding an army — a vast electoral pool — of government dependents. Soon, America will hit the tipping point at which the productive classes are outnumbered — and outvoted — by the nonproductive ones …
While it did not take long it was expected. Former vice president Al Gore put out a statement on his blog on Tuesday and blamed the intensity of Hurricane Sandy on “global warming pollution.”
New York and New England were hit with powerful hurricanes in 1821 and 1938. In 1821, the hurricane was called, The Great September Gale. In 1938, the hurricane, aptly named the Long Island Express, slammed New York and New England with winds of up to 120 MPH. The Berkshire Eagle lists other hurricanes and tropical storms dating back to 1635 that have hit the east coast.
Is Mr. Gore saying that these massive hurricanes were caused by some form of man-made global warming…really? Please.
The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.??? For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the one to dole out federal emergency assistance and the great consoler around whom we instinctively rally in such circumstances.
Perhaps more importantly for Team Obama, many voters are going to have many other things on their minds for the next few, critical days instead of thinking about the evidence that their commander in chief was seriously derelict regarding the murderous attack in Benghazi, Libya …
2012 Election Boogie. Rock. Rise up to kill the Commies, science men and fluoride. There was no way to sing such a song without toggling the “mean vocal” effect on the recording console.
The Romney/Ryan Administration has activated the Emergency Private Sector Alert System.
This is not a test.
This alert applies to the entire Eastern Seaboard and inland Northeast.
Due to necessary and moral cuts to the National Weather Service, we were notified of an impending hurricane after it made landfall at Trump’s casino in Atlantic City.
The storm is producing rain, wind and storm surge that is in no way related to science or global warming. These things happen.
Residents are urged to climb on their rooftops and await state funding.
Better still, await assistance from:
. . . which will be arriving soon.
You can further prepare and ride out the storm by reading Ayn Rand’s Guide to Disaster Assistance and Squirrel Cuisine.
Incumbent Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who’s held the seat since 1993, faces Democrat John Delaney, a financier from Potomac making his first run for public office. Libertarian Nickolaus Mueller also is on the ballot.
Kurtz gives Delaney the edge.
“Polls have it pretty close. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrat in the state who thinks Bartlett’s going to win, and probably privately, most Republicans don’t think he’s going to win either.”
Kurtz says it’s telling that “the political arm of the House Republicans hasn’t given Bartlett a dime.” Yet it has given other vulnerable caucus members money.
“I think they see (Bartlett’s campaign) as a lost cause,” Kurtz says.
A recent poll shows that the race between Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Democratic challenger John Delaney for Maryland’s 6th District congressional seat is a dead heat.
The (Baltimore) Sun commissioned OpinionWorks to conduct the telephone survey of 610 likely voters. The survey took place from Oct. 20 to Oct. 25.
This may come as a surprise to all those who believed the 10-term Buckeystown congressman’s political career was on its last legs.
According to The Sun, however, this new poll may not reflect the voting on Election Day. Delaney, the story says, is coming on strong in the homestretch, while Bartlett “is not performing as well in the district” as GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Frederick, incidentally, is where the center of US bioterror defense, Ft. Detrick (and now the NBACC), is located.
Since the anthrax mailings besmirched the reputation of Ft. Detrick, many in the Frederick area refused to believe Ivins did the deed. This turned the politically savvy Bartlett into an anthrax-denier, one in a small but vocal cult which lobbied, and still lobbies, for a re-opening of the FBI case.
Nothing has changed, except they’ve become louder and much worse since the primaries.
The enemy in music for the election countdown.
Global warming and evolution as hoaxes, hound gays, hoard a big pile of gold, put people to death — as many as you can and as quickly as possible, scary Ted Nugent. I got to the screw with the reproductive rights of women bits later.
It’s a lot to stick in one tune.
And I’ll have one later this week, another in the string of ZZ Top-styled satires of the state of that part of the country that dearly wants to redo the Civil War.
