They are Shocked, Shocked I tell you!

I’ve written a lot about my experience watching the Republican party gut support for the ERA, women’s reproductive rights, and eventually mainstream economics, science and rational thought. I became an unintentional activist in the 1980s when the Nebraska State Chair of the Democratic Party signed me up for a Republican county convention and told me to go fight to keep women’s rights in the Republican Party Platform.  Starry-eyed kid that I was, I said that I’d give it a try even though I really wanted to just work on the issues I cared about like the ERA.  Every time I wanted to give up, she sent me back in to try again.  She told me that nothing good would ever come to the country if both parties weren’t filled with reasonable people.

What I witnessed in the 1980s in Omaha, Nebraska was a series of elections where storefront churches sent women and men into Republican conventions and organizations with little white cards that basically had marching orders and talking points.  The women had long, straight, lifeless hair and faces.  The wore empire waist, gingham, home made dresses.  I came in with my dress for success power suit and my newly minted economics MS.  I was no match for what I discovered was Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in the flesh.  I’d read that book for a  High School English class and thought it only explained Nazis.  The fembots read their objections to the ERA and to birth control and abortion access from their cards written by their male pastors with their nodding, smiling husbands at their side.  I never considered sisterhood to be universal after that.

By about my second convention, I was being shouted down and called names that I won’t mention here.  The Party establishment–mostly members of the Omaha Country Club–represented the city’s business interests, lawyers and doctors.  They were completely unprepared for the ruckus.  The meme for the decade was that platforms don’t matter.  Let them put in whatever they want.  They needed the votes for their own agendas.  It was implied that all of this was lip service.  I left the party quite a few years before Pat Robertson won Iowa but let me tell you I wasn’t surprised.  My own run for the unicameral was an eye-opening experience.  You’ve never experienced fascism in quite a personal way until you have a campaign run against you from the pulpits of catholic and evangelical churches.  Those folks will do and say anything, literally. Forget Stalin, christofascists believe their ends justify the use of any means necessary, and the scary thing is that their neighbors will believe them.  It’s nothing less than a crusade of lies, anger and mean.

I’ve been reading The Politics Blog written by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine with encouragement from SkyDancing reader Ralph.  He’s got a great piece up today on how the chickens are coming home to roost for those country club Republicans that really, really want Mitt Romney or some other country club Republican to be likable enough to beat Barack Obama.  The powers that be want to gut Frank-Dodd and ensure that we can drill relentlessly in whatever garden of Eden they choose. They are fully aware that independents like me will run from the likes of Santorum and Perry.  Rove and his cronies are salivating over the vulnerability of the president.  They are also savvy enough to know they are riding in a clown car that they bought and paid for with funds and fundie ass-kissing.  They should’ve thought a bit more about the ride before they gave the keys to insane people.

Precisely how many times are we going to be treated to public expressions of mock horror from Important Conservatives that 40 years of allying themselves with nativist hooligans, anti-intellectual crackpots, Christomaniacs, and the sad detritus of American apartheid finally has produced a field of presidential candidates that these same Important Conservatives find less than adequate? Once again, the whole exercise requires both the writer and the reader to ignore the obvious consequences of four decades of political history and conclude that the Republican party has lost its mind only recently. And it requires both the writer and reader to convince themselves that out there, somewhere, is a superior candidate to the ones presently available, and to ignore the obvious conclusion that titans like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Paul Ryan chose not to run because they suspected they might get beaten like gongs, if not by President Obama, then by the wholly unacceptable Willard Romney.

And Bobby Jindal? Just stop, okay? You’re killing me.

(By the way, Politico? Quoting Fred Barnes on anything is the recognized international I Got Nothin’ signal. Quoting Fred Barnes on American politics is the functional equivalent of asking a fruit bat what it thinks about the trade deficit.)

Yes, the stern father is trying to get the keys to the clown car back from people completely dedicated to a crusade to turn the US into something completely disdained by the founders; a theocracy. The delightful Pierce read is a response to this “think” piece at Politico on the batch of wackos and the dull ideal-less Willard that have gone in and come out of Iowa. Not one of them is wholly acceptable to the mishmash of sociopaths associated with today’ Republican party.  Some are anathema to the Tea Party.  Santorum and Gingrich are the ultimate corrupt, lobbying insiders.  Others are not trusted by the christofascist crusaders.  The two sane candidates on deck are Mormons and way too reasonable–in the manner of reason that only today’s Republican faithful can define–and way too attached to reality to be acceptable to a group of people who reject modern civilization. Huntsman and Romney can’t be enthusiastically elected in today’s pared down Republican party which requires a pathological detachment from reality. Examine the evidence of Eric Cantor, who went into a state of apoplexy on 60 minutes last week when being told that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times and compromised with Democrats many more times than that.

This is what happens when you sell your souls for votes and unfettered greed.  We’re in about the 7th ring of a Republican-made hell right now and the country club dudes want out of their Faustian bargain so they can stay there.  Their compadres at the wheel want to go straight to ring 10.  We’re living their Divine Comedy with the rich grabbing everything, endless unemployment driving wages down, and absolute lax enforcement of the remaining Nixonian regulation. Yet, they could capture both the Senate and the White House.

Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.

There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.

There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.

This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.

“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?

Not likely.”

That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.

Whoever wrote this piece has never spent any serious time researching Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal who has absolutely gutted our state’s universities and hospitals so that he can say he didn’t increase the number of people on the state’s payroll.  They haven’t checked the state’s unemployment rate which has doubled under his watch.  They certainly haven’t listened to him speak.  You have to be a speed listener to do that.  It takes special powers  Then, there is Paul Ryan that’s as big of a crank as any one I’ve seen in public office recently.  Even Newt Gingrich recognized his entitlement reforms as right wing engineering before he was called out by the other cranks.

This is the problem.  The Republican Party has spent 40 years purging their ranks.  There is nothing left but candidates so flexible with their positions they’ve been on every side of every issue or people so frightening that you wouldn’t want them near your children.  Consider Senator David Vitter whose record is simply impeccable for every one in the clown car.  Ask people if they’d want to spend time with him and every one runs for the door and hides their daughters.  Consider the number of Republicans from which you’d hide your young sons.  You name any Republican these days and you can point to either the freewheeling old school hypocrisy or the creepy “I don’t believe in science, math, history, and reality” factor.  They elect soci0paths in safe districts because they are reliable voters for the party’s special interests.

Consider Bachmann’s insistence today–as she headed for the hatchback door–that Obama is a socialist as best represented by Obamacare. It seems her evangelical fundie friends just couldn’t do it for a woman. She hit the eject button.  But, she’s still doling out the crazy.  Consider that Obamacare with its individual mandate is the Heritage Foundation/Republican Senate Health care response to Hillary Clinton’s health care study.  Republicans got a Republican plan that both Romney and Gingrich supported in the 1990s because it was the Republican plan and came from the Heritage Foundation.  Some how they’ve pinned it on Obama and deemed it socialist.  How can any one reconcile this with out some part of their brain imploding?  The individual mandate was the hallmark of the Republican plan.  All you have to do is check the Legislative record or the press articles of the day.  It was one of the things Obama supposedly opposed when he ran as a Democrat.  How can any Republican candidate that’s had enough experience to be the president run away from former Republican policy initiatives and conveniently forget that Obama opposed it before he loved it?

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.

In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was opposed to the individual mandate. He stated the following in a Feb. 28, 2008 interview on the Ellen DeGeneres show about his divergent views with Hillary Clinton:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

The Republican clowncar ride these days enforces a strict policy of historical amnesia.  Pierce sees the contortionist sideshow that’s become the Romney candidacy.  Romney’s put himself into a denial pretzel to runaway from Republican past.

It is at moments like this in which I feel just the faintest twinge of sympathy for our man Willard. I mean, what more does the poor sap have to do? He’s walked back his previous ironclad commitments and then he walked back many of his own walk-backs. He has abased himself before all the steaming iron gods of modern conservatism. He’s grabbed control of the wild-west landscape produced by the Citizens United decision and demonstrated that he has absolutely no conscience regarding using anonymous corporate button men on the opposition while pretending all the while that he’s Michael Corleone at his nephew’s christening. And still he’s got people sniping at him, and dreaming their dreamy dreams about thuggish governors of New Jersey, diminutive governors of Indiana, and zombie-eyed granny-starvers from Wisconsin. It can’t be easy being the cousin that every Important Conservative winds up having to take to the prom.

Willard, if you want to play up to today’s Republicans, you’re going to have to literally have a come to Jesus moment.  Like Bobby Jindal, you’re going to have to give up the religion of your family and force your wife and kids to convert.  You’re going to have to say you were deceived by Satan and that explains the entire Massachusetts Governor thing.  It almost worked for Newt right?  The best deal is that you can contort yourself into the new Willard and Newt will forever be Newt.

I have no intention of ever voting Republican again.  That does not mean, however, that the Democratic Party gets my vote by default as I think Obama and others are expecting.  I am clearly looking for something else.  I do not intend to sell out all of my education and principles to settle for the anti-war but otherwise incredibly cracked crackpot Ron Paul who is a throwback to the confederacy. There is no way Donald Trump’s narcissism and hype traps me into forgetting how he took all that parental money and government money and parlayed it into bankruptcy.  He is not the greatest showman on earth.  Nader pretty much encompasses all of those complaints and more.  Bloomberg?  Forget about it!  This could very well be the first major election that I will give a resounding pass.  In that case, consider Mary Landrieu a lost cause.  She’ll never squeak through in today’s Louisiana where the electorate was changed by a Rovian exodus.  The only thing that could drive me to the polls is fear of Mitch McConnell as majority leader.  Is this what the democratic experience has come to?

This maybe the worst election year ever.