There's an awful whisper making the rounds now on the outer fringes of the Left - you know, that part of my half of the political spectrum, mostly living on the two coasts who reckons they are much more intelligent, more intellectual and more open-minded than we lesser brethren who are forced to inhabit a land they'd love to see seceded.
The whisper is this, and it's arrogance itself: That now that it looks as though Mitt Romney just might secure the Republican nomination, that's really not a bad thing.
Really, it isn't, they reason - because this is the faction of the Left who are wishing and hoping and praying and thinking that Obama will lose. These are the intellectual lightweights who really, really believe they're the heavyweights, who invested so much of their own personal agenda and idea of political utopia onto being the hipster who voted for the black guy because - hey, that's what credible Lefties do. Ne'mind that John Edwards, their personal choice, had dropped out of the race. I mean, black people are radical, aren't they? I mean, there's all this stuff about Black Panthers and John Carlos and everything. We'll just back the black guy, whom we hope will turn out acting like Shaft, then we can really say we're post-racial.
Thing is, we're not, and if they only voted for the President because of his skin colour and how much that added to the enhancement of their own ego as liberals and street cred as being au courant, then it really speaks volumes of their naivete and stupidity.
But the message is out there, and I've been reading it for months in the comments on various so-called Progressive websites - sites like Huffington Post and Salon, run by corporate media whores or those who want to be the same and who hide their subtle white-privileged racism behind a mask of faux frustration and concern for a demographic of people (the fabled middle class), with whom they either have no connection or from whom they've fled as though fleeing from the plague.
The message is whispered almost with a sigh of relief, that it will be all right, it won't be so bad, if someone like Mitt Romney gets nominated and wins the election next year. Their reckoning is that it's only four years, and besides, look at the Republicans. They were well and truly down and out in 2008, yet look how they bounced back. They bounced back so hard that they took the House back two years later. If the Republicans can do this in four years' time, just imagine what the powerful, omniscient and miles more intelligent Progressives can do. After all, we can spell.
Even one of the loudest voices, purporting to be a Progressive, has picked up the "Mitt's OK" meme and is pushing it far and wide in every interview at every opportunity. Visiting the East Coast in order topimp his book make some television appearances, Bill Maher called in on George Stephanopoulos on Monday morning, to express his fervent hope that Romney will be the nomineee.
Take a look:-
So, there you have it. Mitt's the man, the only thing separating us from "the apes," which, I suppose, is Bill Maher's racist contribution to Herman Cain's candidacy. But, hey, do unto Herman as you would do and have done unto Barack, Bill. Racism doesn't recognise political parties, as your friends Joan Walsh and Chris Matthews would surely know.
Mitt would be fine, because of all the Republicans, according to Bill, Mitt seems to be the most civilised one of the bunch, and on paper, to some of these people who either refuse or are simply unable to think critically, I suppose he would be. After all, he was governor of a Northern, East Coast and traditionally liberal state. He devised a healthcare program for the citizens of that state. During his tenure as governor, he went on record as being pro-choice. In the 1990s, when he ran for the Senate, he ran to the Left of his opponent Ted Kennedy, an old family friend. His father was to the Left of Rockefeller in the days when there actually were Republicans who were ueber liberal. His family were friends with Martin Luther King, and his father was, arguably, the most honest politician in America during the 1960s. Sure, Mitt flip-flops, but he's only doing that to get the nomination, and after that, things will settle down, all right.
Except they won't.
I happen to think David Plouffe was correct in his assertion that Romney has no core. He's the worst sort of panderer, but in the end, should he win the ultimate prize, his pandering will be all for nought. For every pithy EmoProg who whines about this President being "weak" (he's not) and "leading fro behind" (he doesn't), you ain't seen nothing until you see President Mitt Romney's dog being wagged by the tail that's a Republican Congress.
Romney is craven in his suck-ups to the Tea Party, and a Romney Presidency means the Teabaggers will call in their debts. DADT's repeal will be repealed, a Constitutional amendment will be enacted which defines marriage as only applicable to heterosexual couples, the Department of Education will be defunct, Planned Parenthood defunded, and abortion made illegal, even for rape or incest; and if you don't think President Romney won't sign any bill on his desk for any of these issues, you'll have another think coming.
True, the Republicans were on the ropes at the end of 2008, but they had one brilliant constant on which they could rely entirely - the Democratic Party. They knew all they had to do was sit back, say "no," and it wouldn't be long before the Democrats were sniping and griping amongst themselves. They also knew that a seminal Presidency - the first African American President - would have a higher standard by which it was judged than any other Presidency (with the possible exception of the first female President); the media would take care of this - questioning his every action, his every judgement, parsing every word of every speech.
Fox News did what it was expected, but the show was stolen by the so-called liberal media - Arianna Huffington, Republican cleverly disguised as a born-again Progressive, appointing herself spokesperson for the middle class about whom she knew nothing, Maher's subtle reminders to everyone, pejoratively, that the President wasn't only black, but he was a failure even at that. Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman and Keith Olbermann screaming about the inadequacies of the President's response to the Gulf oil crisis. Rachel Maddow with her cute imitations of the President, telling us what he should say. Adam Green spreading lie after lie about entitlements being cut mercilessly.
And all of them, all of them, deliberately inflating the office of President of the United States with powers it never had, whilst deflating any roll Congress has in actual legislation, to the point that Congress, itself, specifically the Democrats within, abnegated any provocative legislation they had to undertake with the perpetual whine about the President needing to be more involved; and when that involvement was finally effected, the whine grew louder that he was overstepping his brief.
And everything was always the President's fault. Media people have called him a "dick," and a "pussy." A West Coast Congressman was heard to scream "fuck the President," another lobbied for his impeachment because this President followed a UN resolution regarding the Libyan situation, with the absolute minimum of loss to American life. Those congressmen were Democrats. When bin Laden was killed, Michael Moore labelled him a murderer.
These EmoProgs think the Republicans did wonders to recoup and come back strong in less than four years' time? Of course, they did; Progressives helped them achieve their goal.
We spent the past three years worrying and sniping about what the President said or did or didn't say or didn't do, when that was really only a pisspoor attempt to hide the latent Leftwing brand of racism which didn't like the idea of a black man being in charge unless a white man were behind the curtain pulling the strings. Affirmative Action, after all, never meant for anyone of colour to make it to the pinnacle.
The Tea Party grew because they got as much exposure from MSNBC as they did from Fox. Chris Matthews salivated over Sarah Palin. Bill Maher got creepily cosy with the likes of Darrell Issa and bowed from the waist when Huffington made her corporate coup. We told ourselves smugly that, unlike the Foxbots, we "criticized" our President - but always constructively, even though it turned out to be wanton and gratuitous.
We listened to corporate suits who became our "voices" to such an extent that we believe them when they told us that the President was a "quisling" or an "appeaser," then we settled down snugly when the same voice read us a bedtime story from James Thurber once weekly.
That fit. We are a nation of spoiled children.
When another talking head, who expostulated daily, espoused punishing the President by not voting in the midterms, we did just that. That is why the Republican - specifically, the Tea Party Republicans - gained control of the House. That is why we're laboured with people like Allen West and Joe Walsh and Aqua Buddhaman Rand Paul determining our laws. That is why Paul Ryan gets exposure for a budget which will end Social Security and Medicare as we know it. And Romney supports Paul Ryan's calculations.
You will get all of that and more with a Romney Presidency, even though the Republicans, themselves, really aren't that bothered if Romney or Obama win the White House this year. They're clever. They think outside the box. They want the Senate. Keep the House and gain the Senate, and you've got gridlock or you can force the Democratic President to the Right. They have their strong boys lined up for a challenge in 2016 - Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Thune.
Who's on the Democrats' horizon? Russ Feingold? Alan Grayson? Andrew Cuomo? Can you see any of those three carrying a swing state of North Carolina, Virginia or even Ohio? And whilst the Republicans wouldn't want to defend Mitt Romney, a man most of them casually hate, for a second term, their guys aren't so old that they couldn't run for President in 2020.
Our actions and those of the corporate concern trolls in the media have enabled these Republicans as much as those people who voted Nader in 2000, enabled Bush. We need to be remembering Karl Rove's masterplan for an unbroken hegemony of Republican rule, and how close he actually is to achieving that; and these Republicans are not your father's Republican party of nice guys like Rockefeller and Mark Hatfield. This is the lean, mean GOP of Ron Paul and Jim DeMint, of Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin, Joe Walsh and Joe Wilson, of Grover Norquist who wants to shrink government to the size of a bathtub, of Libertarians who want to end the public school system as we know it and rule women's reproductive organs.
The United States of Corporations and Koch Brothers.
At the moment, Michael Moore is taking a dangerous message to the young people of the Occupy movement, many of whom - like the people who preach to them on television - are politically naive. His message is that voting doesn't matter, so why vote? Others from the cynical Left present the President as the lesser of two evils. Even Bill Maher on a papal visit to Occupy Los Angeles, reluctantly admitted that the President at least managed to appoint two reasonable Supreme Court justices.
And there's the rub. If you listen to all of the above usual suspects, and you still think it's OK, in fact, it's great that the Republicans have presented us with a reasonably sane candidate and potential President, under whose auspices, we could regather our strength during the next, short four years, I leave you with only two words to ponder:-
Supreme Court.
The whisper is this, and it's arrogance itself: That now that it looks as though Mitt Romney just might secure the Republican nomination, that's really not a bad thing.
Really, it isn't, they reason - because this is the faction of the Left who are wishing and hoping and praying and thinking that Obama will lose. These are the intellectual lightweights who really, really believe they're the heavyweights, who invested so much of their own personal agenda and idea of political utopia onto being the hipster who voted for the black guy because - hey, that's what credible Lefties do. Ne'mind that John Edwards, their personal choice, had dropped out of the race. I mean, black people are radical, aren't they? I mean, there's all this stuff about Black Panthers and John Carlos and everything. We'll just back the black guy, whom we hope will turn out acting like Shaft, then we can really say we're post-racial.
Thing is, we're not, and if they only voted for the President because of his skin colour and how much that added to the enhancement of their own ego as liberals and street cred as being au courant, then it really speaks volumes of their naivete and stupidity.
But the message is out there, and I've been reading it for months in the comments on various so-called Progressive websites - sites like Huffington Post and Salon, run by corporate media whores or those who want to be the same and who hide their subtle white-privileged racism behind a mask of faux frustration and concern for a demographic of people (the fabled middle class), with whom they either have no connection or from whom they've fled as though fleeing from the plague.
The message is whispered almost with a sigh of relief, that it will be all right, it won't be so bad, if someone like Mitt Romney gets nominated and wins the election next year. Their reckoning is that it's only four years, and besides, look at the Republicans. They were well and truly down and out in 2008, yet look how they bounced back. They bounced back so hard that they took the House back two years later. If the Republicans can do this in four years' time, just imagine what the powerful, omniscient and miles more intelligent Progressives can do. After all, we can spell.
Even one of the loudest voices, purporting to be a Progressive, has picked up the "Mitt's OK" meme and is pushing it far and wide in every interview at every opportunity. Visiting the East Coast in order to
Take a look:-
So, there you have it. Mitt's the man, the only thing separating us from "the apes," which, I suppose, is Bill Maher's racist contribution to Herman Cain's candidacy. But, hey, do unto Herman as you would do and have done unto Barack, Bill. Racism doesn't recognise political parties, as your friends Joan Walsh and Chris Matthews would surely know.
Mitt would be fine, because of all the Republicans, according to Bill, Mitt seems to be the most civilised one of the bunch, and on paper, to some of these people who either refuse or are simply unable to think critically, I suppose he would be. After all, he was governor of a Northern, East Coast and traditionally liberal state. He devised a healthcare program for the citizens of that state. During his tenure as governor, he went on record as being pro-choice. In the 1990s, when he ran for the Senate, he ran to the Left of his opponent Ted Kennedy, an old family friend. His father was to the Left of Rockefeller in the days when there actually were Republicans who were ueber liberal. His family were friends with Martin Luther King, and his father was, arguably, the most honest politician in America during the 1960s. Sure, Mitt flip-flops, but he's only doing that to get the nomination, and after that, things will settle down, all right.
Except they won't.
I happen to think David Plouffe was correct in his assertion that Romney has no core. He's the worst sort of panderer, but in the end, should he win the ultimate prize, his pandering will be all for nought. For every pithy EmoProg who whines about this President being "weak" (he's not) and "leading fro behind" (he doesn't), you ain't seen nothing until you see President Mitt Romney's dog being wagged by the tail that's a Republican Congress.
Romney is craven in his suck-ups to the Tea Party, and a Romney Presidency means the Teabaggers will call in their debts. DADT's repeal will be repealed, a Constitutional amendment will be enacted which defines marriage as only applicable to heterosexual couples, the Department of Education will be defunct, Planned Parenthood defunded, and abortion made illegal, even for rape or incest; and if you don't think President Romney won't sign any bill on his desk for any of these issues, you'll have another think coming.
True, the Republicans were on the ropes at the end of 2008, but they had one brilliant constant on which they could rely entirely - the Democratic Party. They knew all they had to do was sit back, say "no," and it wouldn't be long before the Democrats were sniping and griping amongst themselves. They also knew that a seminal Presidency - the first African American President - would have a higher standard by which it was judged than any other Presidency (with the possible exception of the first female President); the media would take care of this - questioning his every action, his every judgement, parsing every word of every speech.
Fox News did what it was expected, but the show was stolen by the so-called liberal media - Arianna Huffington, Republican cleverly disguised as a born-again Progressive, appointing herself spokesperson for the middle class about whom she knew nothing, Maher's subtle reminders to everyone, pejoratively, that the President wasn't only black, but he was a failure even at that. Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman and Keith Olbermann screaming about the inadequacies of the President's response to the Gulf oil crisis. Rachel Maddow with her cute imitations of the President, telling us what he should say. Adam Green spreading lie after lie about entitlements being cut mercilessly.
And all of them, all of them, deliberately inflating the office of President of the United States with powers it never had, whilst deflating any roll Congress has in actual legislation, to the point that Congress, itself, specifically the Democrats within, abnegated any provocative legislation they had to undertake with the perpetual whine about the President needing to be more involved; and when that involvement was finally effected, the whine grew louder that he was overstepping his brief.
And everything was always the President's fault. Media people have called him a "dick," and a "pussy." A West Coast Congressman was heard to scream "fuck the President," another lobbied for his impeachment because this President followed a UN resolution regarding the Libyan situation, with the absolute minimum of loss to American life. Those congressmen were Democrats. When bin Laden was killed, Michael Moore labelled him a murderer.
These EmoProgs think the Republicans did wonders to recoup and come back strong in less than four years' time? Of course, they did; Progressives helped them achieve their goal.
We spent the past three years worrying and sniping about what the President said or did or didn't say or didn't do, when that was really only a pisspoor attempt to hide the latent Leftwing brand of racism which didn't like the idea of a black man being in charge unless a white man were behind the curtain pulling the strings. Affirmative Action, after all, never meant for anyone of colour to make it to the pinnacle.
The Tea Party grew because they got as much exposure from MSNBC as they did from Fox. Chris Matthews salivated over Sarah Palin. Bill Maher got creepily cosy with the likes of Darrell Issa and bowed from the waist when Huffington made her corporate coup. We told ourselves smugly that, unlike the Foxbots, we "criticized" our President - but always constructively, even though it turned out to be wanton and gratuitous.
We listened to corporate suits who became our "voices" to such an extent that we believe them when they told us that the President was a "quisling" or an "appeaser," then we settled down snugly when the same voice read us a bedtime story from James Thurber once weekly.
That fit. We are a nation of spoiled children.
When another talking head, who expostulated daily, espoused punishing the President by not voting in the midterms, we did just that. That is why the Republican - specifically, the Tea Party Republicans - gained control of the House. That is why we're laboured with people like Allen West and Joe Walsh and Aqua Buddhaman Rand Paul determining our laws. That is why Paul Ryan gets exposure for a budget which will end Social Security and Medicare as we know it. And Romney supports Paul Ryan's calculations.
You will get all of that and more with a Romney Presidency, even though the Republicans, themselves, really aren't that bothered if Romney or Obama win the White House this year. They're clever. They think outside the box. They want the Senate. Keep the House and gain the Senate, and you've got gridlock or you can force the Democratic President to the Right. They have their strong boys lined up for a challenge in 2016 - Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Thune.
Who's on the Democrats' horizon? Russ Feingold? Alan Grayson? Andrew Cuomo? Can you see any of those three carrying a swing state of North Carolina, Virginia or even Ohio? And whilst the Republicans wouldn't want to defend Mitt Romney, a man most of them casually hate, for a second term, their guys aren't so old that they couldn't run for President in 2020.
Our actions and those of the corporate concern trolls in the media have enabled these Republicans as much as those people who voted Nader in 2000, enabled Bush. We need to be remembering Karl Rove's masterplan for an unbroken hegemony of Republican rule, and how close he actually is to achieving that; and these Republicans are not your father's Republican party of nice guys like Rockefeller and Mark Hatfield. This is the lean, mean GOP of Ron Paul and Jim DeMint, of Mitch McConnell and Sarah Palin, Joe Walsh and Joe Wilson, of Grover Norquist who wants to shrink government to the size of a bathtub, of Libertarians who want to end the public school system as we know it and rule women's reproductive organs.
The United States of Corporations and Koch Brothers.
At the moment, Michael Moore is taking a dangerous message to the young people of the Occupy movement, many of whom - like the people who preach to them on television - are politically naive. His message is that voting doesn't matter, so why vote? Others from the cynical Left present the President as the lesser of two evils. Even Bill Maher on a papal visit to Occupy Los Angeles, reluctantly admitted that the President at least managed to appoint two reasonable Supreme Court justices.
And there's the rub. If you listen to all of the above usual suspects, and you still think it's OK, in fact, it's great that the Republicans have presented us with a reasonably sane candidate and potential President, under whose auspices, we could regather our strength during the next, short four years, I leave you with only two words to ponder:-
Supreme Court.
thanks for saying exactly what i was thinking! Hey I found out about you from The Obama Diary - so glad someone steered me to you - thanks a4alice
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