OK, undecideds. Here’s the deal: If you haven’t settled on a candidate yet then you are either an egotistical imbecile basking in the undeserved attention, or on a feeding tube. What are you waiting for, coupons?? You already have everything you need to know. Do everybody a favour and stay home November 6th. Watch “Honey Boo Bo” and plan your career path. Maybe you could bring a pair of dice to the voting booth but, face it, your vote is as relevant as a spoilt ballot. Your voice certainly wasn’t worth the wait so, to paraphrase Eddie Murphy, “Have a Koch and a smile and shut the fuck up”.
Headings:
Romney Apocalypse
Hypocritic Oaf
Me Pluribus Unum
Onward Corporate Soldiers
Voter Flawed
Blame Changer
Fact You!
Puppetry Of The Priebus
Send In The Clowns
Can You Tell Me How To Gut, How To Gut (Through) Sesame Street
Thinking Outside The Fox
The Medium Is The Mess
The King Of Jeers
Romney Apocalypse
Romney’s noble vision for the future is to make the world safe for billionaires and there is just only so much room in the life boats. Alas, by design, it will probably involve sacrificing those not able to crank the oars, their relatives, friends, neighbours, BFFs, pets and hairdressers, to a total of forty-seven percent, but he is willing to take that chance. Paul Ryan’s ex, Ayn Rand, wanted you, as a shiftless peon, to take one for the team. Sorry, but American Exceptionalism is meant only for the exceptional, wink, wink. When you are on top, you deserve a languishing existence with no expense to be spared for your comfort, even if it means destroying financial support for the under classes. Romney even wrote a book about it, (“Profligates in Courage“). The pecking order is going to have to change significantly so get used to the taste of cerebral cortex. Compliance will win air and all-inclusive accommodations to the body farm. You’ll have to learn to travel lightly but don’t worry, you can keep your bowling shoes.
In their massive effort to clean house, the Romney/Ryan administration will need to flush as many high priced American workers down the toilet as is possible so they can right-size the work force to China. That’s where the money is and to Republicans, this is business. If you install a businessman as President, expect a fire sale, with your job as the liquidated asset. Too bad patriotism has no bottom line. Of course they will make conciliatory overtures to creating employment in the US, to provide some optical cover. Just wait for the uplifting speech titled, “Job, Job, Job”.
Businessman as President: Is anybody under the impression that the ideological businessman buys or heads a company to create jobs? That venture capital is an altruistic enterprise that sometimes casually makes a profit if it doesn‘t get in the way of the social welfare? Anyone? Running a country bears no resemblance to running a corporation. You can’t just sell off a state that is under-performing. You don’t have the luxury of reducing citizens to cut costs. Those who exist under you can actually terminate your employment.
Sensata is an American company that produces automotive sensors. Or it did. It had one of the most productive and profitable years ever last year but that’s just not enough for the carnivorous investors at Bain Capital, (funnily enough, after all of this time of his claiming that he has nothing to do with it, includes Mitt Romney). Now the plant is to be shut down in the US and seamlessly re-opened in China, like a hapless corporate quantum particle. Apparently, ungrateful, entitlement-loving American “takers” were not willing to work for a dollar per hour, with no benefits. Can’t a blood-sucking corporate raider get a break here?? Fortunately, labour relations are in their primordial state in China and therefore ripe for callous exploitation, sorry, job creation. Thankfully, China’s GreatWalMart is willing to cut a deal on suicide nets to sweeten the deal. Although, I though it was a bit insensitive that they will be renaming the firm “Schmuck-Fil-A”.
Romney has shown his indelible corporate sympathies in that he wouldn’t even try to lift a finger to stop a company, in which he is invested, from exporting all of it’s jobs to China. The prospect is just too juicy to waste resources on petty patriotic sentimentalities. Do as I say, not as I do. In his existence, a fiduciary responsibility trumps a moral one.
Hypocritic Oaf
Having no foreign policy experience, the only remedy Romney knows is waging war. His reference material must be: “Foreign Policy For Draft-Dodging, Privileged Idiots”. He’s Mr. Fixit but the only tool in his toolbox is a hammer. Not that he is a proud veteran. No, he actually protested in support of the Vietnam war while gleefully avoiding the draft, using the religious deferment card, thus exercising yet another special privilege to avoid an inconvenient obligation, a recurrent theme in Romney‘s life. Exclusion is the better part of valour.
Mitt wants you to know that he is all about a “Big Change”. However, he doesn’t want you to remember that this refers to his latest position on any given issue.
Me Pluribus Unum
One Republican egotistical delusion is that there is never any justification for an apology. Alas, it is the Right man’s burden to be congenitally perfect. You can see how he has studiously avoided any remarks that could be construed in any way as penitent for anything. He never apologised for insulting the Brits or Palestinians. In order to maintain this farce he has had to perform some strenuous callisthenics to avoid contrition when explaining his serial screw-ups or self-serving, callous remarks. Didn‘t hear about those? Try switching to any other network when Fox breaks for a gold commercial. “The 47% slur was wrong. Of course I didn’t mean it. Sometimes the wrong words just come out. I have Stereotyping Tourette’s but, be absolutely clear, I AM IN NO WAY APOLOGISING, shit, fuck, piss”.
Onward Corporate Soldiers
Trickle Down Elmo is an existential corporate shill hiding behind an adhesive-backed veneer of religious piety and certain companies profit handsomely from the prosecution and facilitation of foreign wars so, did you hear? Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear weapon! Praise the Lord and pass the bayonets!
Of course, from their perspective, the Iranians just want the nukes for target practice. The NRA has used that excuse to rationalise innocuous wholesale firearm possession for decades so I’m forced to give Iran the benefit of the doubt.
Voter Flawed
The following are the latest talking points/questions from Republicans that they believe are the unanswerable final words against the resistance to photo ID:
“We will never know how much voter impersonation fraud exists unless you actually require the photo ID”. Really? Never? When a prospective voter discovers that a vote has already been registered in their name when they try to cast their ballot, you’d better believe that the fraud would be discovered, as this person would scream bloody murder and want to sue the Board of Elections. TORT-reforming, liability-averse Republicans are always reminding you that America is a country of frivolous, knee-jerk litigation. So, if there really has been rampant voter fraud of the in-person false ID type, the courts would now be clogged with irate citizens looking for compensation, you know, since voter fraud is so rampant. Those 47% welfare deadbeats. Always looking to get money that they didn’t earn.
“Why shouldn’t I need a photo ID to vote?” So you’d like even more bureaucracy, then? In the absence of a problem, why complicate and increase the cost of the process even further, unless your purpose is to slow progress to a crawl? Hey, maybe a DNA sample and retinal scan should be required as well. The more security, the better! No reason why the government shouldn’t have that information about you on file, right? Normally you don’t take expensive and time consuming remedial action if there is no problem in the first place. Normally. Translated into “Slack-Jaw”: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Hey, fiscally responsible Teaholes: How much taxpayer money has been wasted so far trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?? You do know that that money could have been used to develop roll down window technology for jets by now??
So, voter ID cards will prevent voter fraud? Yeah, and no sixteen year-old knows how to get a phoney driver’s license to get into a bar.
From the Delicious Irony Dept: Voter suppression efforts and the drive to prevent early voting may actually stop some unfortunately located Republicans from voting, due to Sandy shutting down election locations during the last days, presumably the only time when “legitimate” Americans should vote.
Blame Changer
What am I missing? So what if the attack in Benghazi is labelled a terrorist attack or an uprising? Republicans are trying to bring down a government because of a definition? Does it make a difference since the outcome would have been the same even if standard security upgrades were put in effect? The normal compliment of security personnel wouldn’t have stopped a formal assault by a military trained and equipped suicide squad anyway. So, are the GOP staff hecklers insinuating that security was insufficient at the embassy? If so, then ask why House Republicans and Paul Ryan voted to cut $128M in 2011 and $331M in 2012 from the embassy security budget, when they simultaneously allege that all of the cries for extra security were surfacing. Co-incidentally, these are the two years that the Tea Party has been holding the government hostage. Ben Affleck should make a movie about that.
It is often claimed that Obama had two full years to do what he wanted with a Democratic House and Senate. Then the question from dutiful Republicans wishing to label Obama as lazy becomes: “Why didn’t he push through more legislation when he had the chance?” Maybe he thought that he was going to have more time and wouldn’t need to stampede to enact as much legislation as possible, instead of facing the relentless opposition from the American Taliban in Congress and that evolving canker sore, the Tea Party.
This is a patented Conservative ploy: Knock the wheels off of the train and blame the crash on the engineer. They do it with government institutions that they don‘t like, all the time. Reduce funding to a program or agency, watch it falter, then trumpet the failure as a reason to privatise or eliminate it. Oh Republicans, don’t ever change, (I would never believe in it anyway).
They pulled this same trick of relentless distraction to hobble Clinton during his last years as President by slowing him down with impeachment proceedings, as well as constant harassment with criminal and moral investigations and spurious law suits, all while sending you the bill for the efforts. This is the time when the economy first started to tank, leading into the next eight years of a disastrous, long unmitigated and uninterrupted Republican slide into economic meltdown, which the GOP later tried to pin on him. Funnily enough, massive and sustained tax cuts for the “job creators” failed to turn the economy around during the eight years of that massive “Bush fire”. No reason not to try it again, though, eh Mitt? What’s that quote? “The sign of insanity is trying the same tax cuts along with increased military spending that destroyed the economy previously and expecting a different result”. Or something like that.
Fact You!
With liberal use of an industrial disinFACTant, the Romney campaign has managed to scrub any semblance of truth or even details from his nebulous, “insert your outrage here” rhetoric. Chris Christie predicted that Romney would go “line by line” while explaining his budget plans during the debate. Line by line? He didn’t even give page numbers. We’re still waiting for his tax returns. Pursuant to Romney’s fake-based agenda, the latest Romney campaign slogan is “Big Change”. What he doesn’t say is that this refers to his position on any given subject from week to week.
In a calculated spasm of self-deprecating candour running interference for Mitt‘s epic duplicity, Romney’s son, Troll (whatever), admitted that his father had plenty of practice dealing with his serially dishonest children and thus he is qualified to handle government obstructionism writ large(??). What a stark confession! Gee, I wonder from where they got this propensity for lying? Ahh yes, home schooling. So, they have established that the siblings in the Romney brood are chronic, casual liars and since the pink slip never falls far from the job creator, why should we believe anything that any Romney says? His son even recanted his comment about wanting to clobber Obama for calling his father a liar, reinforcing the notion that a Romney will say anything immediately prior to an inevitable mitigating reversal.
Romney’s empire is defined by secrecy. Secret tax records, secret campaign handlers, secret budget details, secret donors. One of his lockstep supporters, Parasite-American Dick Morris, claimed that he had information on poll numbers from more right-wing friendly data collectors that “correct” the mainstream pollsters data but, alas, he can’t tell you who they are because, well, they’re secret. These pervasive clandestine machinations are reminiscent of Soviet Russia. Btw, I’m puzzled by Romney’s animosity towards Russia. With such secrecy everywhere there, think of all of the money he could hide. This paragraph will self-destruct in ten seconds.
Puppetry Of The Priebus
If Romney loves to fire people, he needs to rid himself of most of his incoherent surrogates. RNC chair Reince Priebus, for one, is a feckless zealot who has adopted the party-wide procedure of “all lies, all the time”. He bends and twists his shape to suit any incarnation needed to fake sincerity (ouch). Due to his disregard for honesty or propriety, his factual contortions are exposed for everyone to see and whatever his position, he winds up looking like a dick. This stuff writes itself. How they hanging, Reince? A good man is hard. To find yourself is to lose yourself. Lying is a protocol for Republican media shysters. Talk about having skin in the game.
Send In The Clowns
After evading the spotlight for awhile and finally emerging from the Witless Protection Program are Donald Trump and Glenn Beck, no doubt cognisant of their pending irrelevance. Eager to join other members of the lunatic majority, Trump is flailing for attention again, attempting extortion in prime time this time, while Hannibal Beckter is once again off of his meds, expectorating his superlative rhetoric about imminent end times. The sound of one mouth flapping.
It‘s unclear who is a bigger media slut, Trump or Beck (Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber) but that’s just splitting whores.
Can You Tell Me How To Gut, How To Gut (Through) Sesame Street
Romney was the one who raised the red herring of Big Bird as an issue so he doesn’t get to fake incredulity when he gets the controversy thrown back in his face. The threat that he would remove funding for PBS was a direct and obvious attempt to rattle Jim Lehrer, a long time employee of PBS, and remind him who will be dictating his severance package. Always playing the overbearing boss, he couches his threats in conciliatory language for the cheering peons carrying his litter.
In the scheme of things, PBS funding doesn’t amount to the cost of a car elevator. Romney doesn’t want to cut the funding to eliminate Big Bird. He wants to silence “Frontline”, “Need To Know” and Bill Moyers. Each have been a thorn in the side of Republican cronies, exposing their malfeasance and backroom dealings for years, in the way that commercial television never can because of the ever-looming threat of censorship though petulant defunding, when the partisan sponsors hear something that they don‘t like. By eliminating it’s subsidies, Romney is going to force PBS to rely solely on private corporate financing.
At any time this sponsorship can be summarily revoked to keep them in line and this new vulnerability will fold them into the uncritical, celebrity obsessed network white noise. “Friday! In an all-new episode of ‘Outing CIA Agents With The Stars’! Watch as Darrel Issa reveals the names of Libyans secretly assisting the US, using quickly leaked documents in a clumsy partisan attempt to smear the Obama administration in time for the last debate….Then, tune in to watch the fates of these now visible targets on a very special edition of ‘Wipeout’!”
Thinking Outside The Fox
The pathology of the debates is a good metaphor to support the argument for a second Obama administration. He did not perform optimally in his first attempt but acquitted himself decisively given a second chance. In other words, he learns from his mistakes. The importance of the debates, though, lies in the fact that they are the only venues where those who are hermetically sealed in the through-the-looking-glass, Fox News Vacu-pack will be exposed to information not hidden by Right Wing news minders. These uncritical human placeholders will be forced to hear of details, events and ideas that they never have before and have even taken great pains to avoid. In front of a live audience, Republican lies have to work without a net.
The Medium Is The Mess
Facts became irrelevant in the Romniverse long before Romnesia became an epidemic. Marshall McLuhan is more relevant today than ever. Style and presentation eclipse content and the with assistance of penetrating volume, allow uncontested propaganda to sway receptive idiots, as well as facilitate a great deal of really obnoxious television. Lead in with a flashbang grenade, Auto-tune the message and your audience is assured and susceptible. Romney’s supporters have that proverbial 30 second goldfish memory, very useful to cynical GOP marketing hacks.
Republicans and the Tea Party have reached a tacit agreement that it absolutely doesn’t matter what Romney says to get elected. Content is futile. They will stand back dutifully and let it the detritus wash over them as they don’t need to know what goes into making the hotdog as long as Romney steals the keys to the White House. Subtext and nuance are irrelevant when they don’t even pay attention to the obvious talking points. Ideas are for elitists. GOP supporters are only interested in Commandments. So, signature vacillations notwithstanding, Romney has the “required number of digits”. After he’s elected, and with the singular intransigence of a GOP Congress aiding and abetting his agenda, he will only need the one finger anyway.
I suppose it is a predictable side effect of the demand for instant solutions attendant to the technology age which presumes that any damage or shortcoming can be repaired or resolved immediately, no matter how extreme. Common sense has been upgraded to a desire for instant gratification. I hear laments from critics that there is still no power in certain coastal areas, a week after the superstorm. The Eastern Seaboard was hit by a hurricane the size of Europe but it appears that there are those that feel that the mess should’ve been cleaned up by now. It’s going to take some staggering logistics to restore normalcy to the worst affected areas and will not happen with a drive-by rescue. Similarly, Obama was faced with the most serious financial destruction since the Great Depression yet he is continually criticised for not righting the economy, and furthermore, improving on it, in just four years.
The King Of Jeers
There was some consternation on Fox about the Hurricane Sandy relief concert and how it must just be politically motivated, since nobody on Staten Island has power to watch it on television. Really? Do they actually believe that the broadcast should be targeting Staten Island residents? That the intent is to try to raise money from the very people who they are try to raise it for? Hey! I have an idea: Let’s try to solicit money from homeless people to contribute to a fund for homeless people! Oh, my brain hurts.