Village Idiot

Doris Kerns Goodwin is a buffoon.  Tenured, it is true, plagiarist, is also true; however, her most salient feature and the reason she continues to appear on the weekly political shows is because she is a buffoon. As most of us know Mitt Romney and President Obama just waged a campaign in which Romney spent more time lying about Obama then he did lying about his record and his prospective policies.

Today, for reasons of head cold and a consequently weakened ability to think, I watched NBC yak fest. During the course of several conversation both divorced from reality and filled with falsehoods, Goodwin offered Obama this bit of advice:

I think what the president needs to do is to bring some CEOs into his top positions, FDR did that.  He brought in the head of Chrysler.  He brought in the head of Sears and Roebuck.  What about bringing Romney in to deal with this whole problem of how do you keep manufacturing here rather than going abroad?  What incentives to use?  What sanctions to use against countries that are not dealing fairly?  I think you bring people in but you don’t lose your conviction.  So you got to start with what matters to you but then you compromise on everything else.  And I think it can be done.

Yes, the President needs to boldly and decisively bring in the guy that just lost the election and made a career out of screwing America and the American worker to fix the problem his and his caused. It's only fair.

I mean really.What struck me is that none of the other chatterers even looked askance at the abject stupidity masquerading as historically based insight.

A Tale of Two Campaigns

It seems that shortly after losing his campaign, Romney canceled the credit cards of everyone associated with, himself -- one assumes -- excepted, the campaign.

Obama gave this speech:



via

For whom would you rather work? To whom would you give responsibility?

As I said it was a war against pricks and lying dicks and the prickily dickly doos lost.

Demography is Not Destiny

It appears that Mitt Romney represents older, white, suburban, and exurban voters who earn more than 50k per year and a smaller percentage of women than men from that demographic. Obama, as per the last link, has super majorities among everyone else.  I understand that a non-trivial percentage of Romney voters are racists fucks but not all of them but the racists fucks, as I argue below, were never Romney's base and they would have voted for a cheese sandwich so long as the black man was voted out and White supremacy with its unearned privilege returned.

This is leading many on the left, the right, and in the center to insist that in these United States demography is destiny. Well, it isn't. All of the groups, whether "racial," "ethnic," or biological, this argument must run, vote as they vote because of some in-born, onto-genetic trait or traits.

This is obviously nonsense. The divide here is between folks who have it made and don't care about anyone else correctly identifing. Romney as one of them. In short, Romney, whose concession speech was the quintessence of dickiness and prickitude, base was never right-wing Evangelicals or Tea Party Patriots, it was always the dicks of the world with the added fillip of those whose idea of a decent argument is them making shit up, bullshitting, and generally lying about the world in order to deny that, just as an example, water is wet. And the rest of us who would prefer our elected officials be competent, more or less honest and generally reliable so that we can go about the important business of having lives and enjoying the refreshing beverages of our choice.

That there are a lot of these horrid people in the world as it is, is evidenced by Romney's "bounce" after the first debate. There his lying prickiness and general dickitude were on full display and many of our fellow citizens lapped it up. The same characteristics, lying, prickitudal and dickital tendencies, are what  makes Paul Ryan Romney's ideal running mate.

If you read around the intertubes in the run up to the election, you know doubt read some of the blather about lesser evilism, this will do for the vote Obama as lesser and this as its opposite. Both sides here missed the fundamental point that this election was about driving a stake through the heart of the rule by privileged lying pricks and the continued elevation of competent managers of a nasty, nasty system.

It may well be that over the next four years the Obama Administration will take steps to ensure that the system becomes less nasty by rolling back the obscene policies of the neoliberals. One can hope; however, any reversal of these policies and a revision to the New Deal, only this time for gays, women and non-whites, is going to be a decade long slog.

One can only hope that the sharp rebuke handed to the lying pricks amongst us leads to a much more rapid decline in horrid little men and women gallivanting around and insisting that America, real honest to god America, is a land of horrid people.

I mean just consider the endless garbage by the horrid people who engaged in official and unofficial voter suppression. They failed and in failing shot themselves nicely in the foot. It is one thing to think that the only way you can win is to cheat it; it is quite another to get caught cheating before, during, and after the election while failing to win. That kind of a situation makes the vote suppressors look like what they are: Horrid people to whom and for whom a lie isn't something shameful but a necessary and honorable act in the service of ruining the lives and stunting the fortunes of their fellow citizens.

Debate

On the whole it was a train wreck. Romney lied, condescended, and generally acted like the privileged prick that he is. Obama tried to have an actual discussion based on previously stated positions or the lack thereof. To the extent that this tactic failed, which I am not sure it did, it failed because Romney lied and acted like a privileged prick.

I suspect that most people watching the debate decided that Romney is a privileged and lying prick and that Obama did he best he could trying to pierce the squid ink. As evidence I offer the always wrong Andrew Sullivan's analysis.

Slipppery Slopes

There is an article in the current The New Yorker on the unpunished murder and rape of lesbian, gay men, and the rest, one assumes, of South Africa's LGBT citizens. This is an actual, as opposed to hypothetical, slippery slope argument. Narrow-minded bigots who assume that their sexual orientation and aesthetic judgements are normative have been beating the drum of need if not necessity of excluding gay men and women as well as the rest of the LGBT community from the community of citizens. These bigoted wretches are a danger to us all.

In the US right now there are maniaca insisting on the creation of LGBT concentration camps because they are hate filled nut jobs. I would argue that Obama has nailed his colors to the mast and it is now time for Romney and the rest of the Right to insist that they will not participate in a campaign designed to "improve" by "corrective rape, " which is the South African term for assaulting and murdering lesbians, reparative therapy, or the extirpation our fellow citizens because of the wholly legitimate objects of their sexual or aesthetic desires.

To say nothing of an equally strident repudiation of neoliberal capitalism and then we can have nice things.

Morning America

Years ago Ronald Reagan misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted Springsteen's Born in the USA for narrow partisan reasons. A song and an album about the misery associated with neoliberalism and filled with stories of those Reagan's revolution would completely  discard became in Reagan's hands a paean to conservativism and evidence of America's new dawn. Today, of course, we know that Reagan and his fellow neoliberals and neoconservative had and have no interest in the 99% and were really interested in re-creating the 19th century. They spent the intervening years attempting to convince people that selfishness and disregard for the least among us are both 100% Americanism and real meaning of Christianity's social gospel.

Obama was elected because he promised something better and return to the communal values forged by wars against want and fascism. We are a long way from anything like that. But who knows, maybe the new Springsteen anthem is more than a stunt; perhaps it is, in fact, a promise that the next 4 years will fulfill our hopes and defeat our fears.

In any event, Bruuuuuce: