Why Republicans are fucked

Unlike every election since I was fourteen years old, I just can't bring myself to care about the Republican primaries, and the endless goddamn debates therein, all that much. It's just so sadly predictable and retarded that getting excited about it would make me feel sadly predictable and retarded.

Here's the Tea Party script, in a nutshell: Someone - usually Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann - says something delusionally fucking crazy. The rest of the candidates that aren't Jon Huntsman or Gary Johnson try to say something even crazier. Herman Cain goes out of his way to remind me of Jesse Jackson, and Newt Gingrich can't stop reminding me - and everyone else -  me of Newt Gingrich.

A number of my commenters think I'm wrong in suggesting that Barack Obama is a cinch for re-election next year. But after watching just five minutes of the crazy jerk-offs that Republicans have to choose between, it's hard to see how Obama can lose. Even if the president of the United States were indicted were indicted for running a child-prostitution ring (a constitutional impossibility, I know), he would still beat Rick Perry by at least five points. I think Huntsman could beat Obama, but the fucking wing-nuts that vote in Republican primaries are more interested in making a point than they are in winning an election. Mitt Romney's almost certainly going to be the nominee, but he's going to be forced into so many psychotic positions during the primaries that Obama won't be able to not beat him by at least three points.

Despite being bored to tears by the entire exercise, something interesting actually did happen during last week's otherwise worthless Fox News-Google Republican debate. It was an exchange about Texas' version of the Dream Act, which gives the children of immigrants, even illegal ones, in-state college tution rates.

This is the kind of nonsense that Republicans love talking about, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the Office of the President, which doesn't have college tuition listed among its enumerated constitution powers. GOP presidential candidates often involve themselves in issues that well outside the constitutional reach of the office they seek because they're, y'know, all about small government.

Because he's a moron, Governor Perry utterly fucked up his response to Mitt Romney's whorish carping. He appealed to people's "hearts", seemingly unaware that this is the least favorite organ of any true conservative, myself included. And Republican primary voters are famous for cheering executions and the preventable deaths of the uninsured,  and booing gay soldiers serving in Iraq. Appealing to the hearts of these chucklefucks is possibly the worst political strategy I've ever heard of.

If Perry was smart, which he decidedly ain't, he'd appeal to whatever sense of political expedience they have left. Given their stated position on evolution and climate change, they aren't really good at science, and the Ryan Plan makes me question their comfort with math. But they Electoral College is a mathematical model, which even the goofiest of Tea Partiers would do well to respect.

Young Rick should have picked up on the opportunity that George W. Bush irredeemably threw away during the debate over the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill in 2007. The narrative would involve both governing and politics.

And it would go something like this ...

Gov. Perry: Okay, numbnuts, let's look at my situation for a second here, okay? You keep telling us that RomneyCare was fine the Neverland of your third state, but impossibly fucking evil for the rest of the country. Let's apply that logic more broadly.

I don't know if the Church of Latter Day Saints or the modern Republican primary electorate let's you look at maps, and I don't especially give a shit.

I govern Texas, which constitutes over half of Mexico's border with the United States. Unsurprisingly, there are a ton of wetbacks there. Your Gestapo talk from four years ago about rounding up 13 million people for deportation is so violently unconstitutional that it just ain't gonna happen, so let's drop that shit, right here and right now.

I'm stuck with these fucking people, which means that I'm stuck with a helluva choice. I can either educate them now, or incarcerate them later. While college might be slightly more expensive than prison, you have to realize that you can easily get more than four years for just double-parking where I come from. We're a very backward people that way. Texans also believe in ghosts and UFO abductions.

Hey, did you also know that every dollar spent on building prisons is a dollar that can't be given away in brutally stupid tax cuts? Well, I guess it can, but that means that we'd have to borrow the whole wad of prison-building dough from China, which would be incredibly ironic, if I knew what irony was.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm a fucking politician in Texas? That means I like getting elected between my throatfucking sessions with the oil and gas industry. And Hispanics are the political population bomb that could sink us all to the bottom of the fucking sea, pardner. As good Catholics, they fuck. A lot. So, in my neck of the woods, if you ain't winning Latinos, you ain't winning shit, son.

You have magical underpants and Michele over probably has a tampon that can detect a black helicopter from three hundred miles, so I shouldn't have to tell you this. But my lawyers and my political consultants say that most of the wetback kids are American citizens. That means they get to vote. And while I'm not much for fancy book-learnin', my political instincts tell me that "I'm going to deport your parents and deliberately keep you stupid" isn't an especially effective political slogan in the fucking barrio. Comprende, bendecchio?

Let's look at the Electoral College map. Nixon could win the presidency without Texas because he was from California. But he only barely won. When George H.W Bush lost California in '92, he got his ass kicked, even with Texas. That's why Florida, with all of it's demented Cubans, is so important to us. But the most demented Cubans are starting to die, and we can't rely on that state forever.

Jesus Christ, man, some negro named Barack Hussein Obama won the former Confederate states of Virginia, North Carolina and Florida just three years ago, largely on the strength of the Latino vote. If you believe that can't can't happen where I live, you're on even stronger drugs than I am. And I'm on the best drugs currently available on the black market. You don't think I'm naturally this stupid, do you?

Can you dream up a map where Republicans win without Texas? I sure as fuck can't. And that might not even make a difference when a darkie with a fucking terrorist name wins states like New Mexico without breaking a sweat. Shit, he came within eight points of winning Arizona, the home of our previous nominee! If you think we can win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which an avowed Marxist like McCain lost in landslides, you're even dumber than you look.

Thank y'all for your time.

The fact that Perry didn't say any of that tells me that's doomed in an almost biblical way. I'll be shocked if he's he's still in the race by Christmas.

Of course, this is something else that I've been saying since 2007, which is why I'm so bored of my own fucking blog.

The coming decline and fall of stupidity in conservatism

It never ceases to amaze me that people say, do or support catastrophically dumb things and expect them to end up being anything less than catastrophic. My mayor, Rob Ford, is an object lesson in how this works.

If you've read this space for any length of time, you know that I've hated Ford for years. During last year's campaign, I argued that he was singularly unqualified to run this city and that he would be an unmitigated disaster for conservatism, if only because he isn't especially conservative. He's more of a self-aggrandizing blowhard and a drunken idiot than anything else.

During his decade on City Council, Rob didn't do much of anything other than vote no a lot and make a Coors Lite-fuelled spectacle of himself regularly, which is something that I can do. Being something of an elitist, I always endeavour to vote for people that are smarter than I am, which is significantly harder than you would think it is. The mayor has never built or done anything in his life. His money, his business and his original political base were all inheritances from his Daddy. The guy was environmentally conditioned to be a monumental shithead.

More importantly, his entire election platform was built on a shockingly transparent set of lies. He vowed to withdraw from a fully-funded public transit plan called Transit City, but would expand subway infrastructure using only magic. Actually, that's not entirely true. Ford thought that the deficit-laden federal and provincial governments would give him metric shit-tons of money by virtue of the fact that Ford is a confrontational prick and a borderline retard. And private business would finance the rest, despite the fact that the very same notion proved to be a spectacular failure on the original Sheppard subway line, a decade ago.

Rob further promised to do away with all manner of revenue to the city without cutting services. As a matter of fact, he specifically said that he would expand services where needed. This would be accomplished by cutting things like gardening at Nathan Phillips Square and the hallucination that career politicians would vote themselves into oblivion by reducing the size of Council by 50%.

I spent the better part of a year pointing out that Hizzoner's policy positions were silly and that his math didn't work. Moreover, his plan was based on such a fantastical notion of how politics works that even toddlers shook their heads at it once it was explained to them. Among other things, I said that supporting Ford was an act of willful ignorance, and perhaps evidence of a particularly worrisome extra chromosome.

But it sure as fuck wasn't an expression of actual conservatism. It used to be that conservatism was implacably opposed to things like lying, stupidity and creative math, all of which were liberal creations. In the Tea Party age, all three are campaign strategies, as evidenced by the rise of Rob Ford.

Most of my commenters during the campaign were either as cosmically ignorant of the laws of both both politics and mathematics as Ford himself is, or they acknowledged that he was lying, but it ultimately wouldn't matter. The voters were of a similar mind, and Boy Rob won with a margin that seemed to surprise even him. It sure surprised me.

Being the fan of reality that I am, I decided to sit back and watch the debacle unfold. I may have placed too much faith in the chronically self-interested and genetically defective electorate of this city, but I do understand how politics and, more importantly, math works.

The brothers Ford thought that they could score some easy points a couple of months ago by engaging liberal has-beens like Margaret Attwood over irrelevant issues like library funding. But times have changed and the math hasn't. So now we're looking at pretty dramatic cuts to things like cops, firefighters and the public transit that Ford promised to expand. And the same silly fuckers that supported Ford and putting on their outrage helmets.

One of the biggest polls ever conducted in Toronto shows residents from every corner of the city are overwhelmingly against Mayor Rob Ford’s cuts.  

From Doug Ford’s ward in Etobicoke to budget chief Mike Del Grande’s in Scarborough, the results will serve as a sobering warning to councillors within the Ford voting bloc.  

A Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow. 

More significantly, because of the poll’s size, Forum was able to provide the first authoritative assessment of support on a ward-by-ward level.  

Forum’s poll, which was paid for by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall, questioned 12,848 Toronto residents on Tuesday using a random dial, push-button response, phoning system. The margin of error is plus or minus 0.9 per cent, 19 out 20 times.

Say what you will about the poll being paid for by opportunistic union  hacks, but the sample size is stellar and you almost never see a margin of error like that. I don't see a professional polling firm putting itself out of business just for a quick paycheck from some Gambino Family-connected librarians. These are serious numbers that should be taken awfully fucking seriously.

Most importantly, the revolt is coming from the parts of the city that were the more vehement for Ford just 11 months ago. The numbers from wards like mine, which went heavily for Ford, are staggering and impossible to ignore. Once Hizzoner loses suburban councillors, he's done..

That fat asshole's political base has dropped out from under him. Right-leaning councillors now have the choice of either tying themselves to the fucking Titanic, or representing the wishes of their own constituents. If I know anything at all about politics, we're about to see the mayor reduced to irrelevancy by his own allies. The much-ballyhooed "gravy train" is getting ready to run right over that stupid motherfucker.

Here's the thing. I don't care all that much about service cuts. But the fact remains that Rob Ford went out of his way to specifically promise that they wouldn't occur. More importantly, his entire campaign was predicated on just how bad the municipal budget imbalance was, so he can't realistically hide behind the notion that the numbers were a surprise to him.

The fact is that he was lying, and most semi-reasonable and literate people should have known that. If this were a truly just and equitable world, the wards that supported Ford the hardest - like mine - would feel the goddamned axe most viciously. But I think we know that isn't going to happen, don't we? The coloureds along the Finch West and Eglinton West corridors are going to get hammerfucked directly into hell, while folks like me are going to get by. They already wait 9 hours for a packed and smelly cattle-car of a bus that seems more like it's going to Auschwitz than Yonge Street, so what difference is an extra twenty minutes going to make?

No sane person thinks that Ford is going to annihilate the downtown wards that opposed him the strongest are going to get hurt, either. Shit, the Ford boys want to give those Marxist dickheads more fucking condominiums and lakeshore shopping malls that no one wants to pay for. For chissakes, all the bankers, lawyers and real estate agent cocksuckers live there! And the chances that Rob Ford is going alienate them are about the same as my getting gangbanged by the cast of the new Charlie's Angels.

This isn't a local phenomenon, either. Ontario has a provincial election next month, and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak, who had a double-digit lead just six weeks ago, is poised to have his ass handed to him by Liberal Dalton McGuinty, who has only ever been popular with shitheels and pederasts. And even shitheels and pederasts don't like McGuinty all that much. They just like him a lot more than they do Hudak.

Let's look south of the border for a minute if you're not convinced. Take a look at the Tea Party candidates that actually got elected to positions of adult responsibility, as opposed to the politically laughable MILF brigade of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. As I write this, Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida are all polling behind church burnings. Sure, you could argue that they're only polling slightly behind church burnings, but you you can't ignore the fact that the numbers are upside-down in a big, bad way.

Even weapons-grade morons like Rick Perry aren't immune. Perry took steps to inoculate young girls from an entirely preventable cancer and large segments of the modern right are painting him as a straight Michael Jackson, whimsically dispensing "fuck drugs" to pubescent girls, presumably because he enjoys kidfucking. And that's when they're not running against other applied sciences, like evolution. It's also important to remember that this is the same Rick Perry that was actually applauded when he said that he "didn't lose sleep" over the possibility of executing an innocent person, mostly because he already has.

And they're not necessarily wrong in running their campaigns like that.. If I had their economic policies, I'd want to distract everyone from them by running against Darwin and for cervical cancer as much as I possibly could. The only halfway coherent plan out there is Paul Ryan's, which immediately increases the deficits that Republicans are running against in a huge way, and might balance the budget in thirty years, which just happens to be about twenty-five years too late for it to do any good.

The goddamned Birchers, with their celebrated hatred of fluoride and all, are welcomed as fellow travelers of the modern Right, while someone like John Huntsman - who was elected as governor of fucking Utah, hardly a coffee clatch for the AFL-CIO and ACLU - isn't. That, my friends, isn't a ship that can keep the water out for very long.

The only thing that has allowed these people to get as far as they have is the fact that liberals are liberals. As such, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If they were even halfway smart, they'd do what Bill Clinton did, which was steal issues from the right and address them in a way that's acceptable to the general electorate. At that point, it's pretty easy to paint your enemies as extremist assholes.

But even that's beyond the ability of most of the left. Dalton McGuinty is the exception in that he's blessed with ineffective and retarded enemies, much like Stephen Harper has been. The important difference is that, since becoming prime minister, Harper has essentially governed as a Liberal and faced an impossibly divided opposition. Accordingly, there are no lessons to be drawn from his experience.

That isn't always going to true, folks. At some point - in the very near future, I suspect, we're going to be steamrolled by our stupidity. And the long-term prospects of recovery aren't going to be good. Say what you will about Herbert Hoover, but he didn't spend the Depression yelling about teen fucking, The Origin of the Species, and imagining magical subways as the country was in mortal peril. And we are.

Not only are we fucked. We deserve to be.

In a tizzy about tiff

Every year at this time, my already formidable misanthropy goes into overdrive. As summer turns to fall, I feel my hatred boiling and I know that the Toronto International Film Festival is near.

This year is worse than others because I am in the thick of it. I currently work right in the middle of the festivities and there is no escape. As I write this, every art fag and starfucker in the Northern Hemisphere is within three blocks of where I work. On Friday afternoon, I was told that Paul Giamatti, one of the greatest thespians of our age, was in front of my building. Sadly, he fled before I could give him shit about the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Tiff begins the slow and sad process that culminates with the Oscars, where James Franco and Anne Hathaway humiliate themselves and their entire industry. In a crafty response, the industry is deploying Eddie Murphy, who surrendered his dignity decades ago. And it all begins here in Toronto.

Don't get me wrong, I like what passes for our culture just fine. I just like it a whole lot more when it isn't blocking the fucking sidewalk. There's nothing like rubbing shoulders with depraved Hollywood studio executives and their demented marketing experts and listening to them scheme about the 42nd reboot of an exhausted comic book franchise to provoke a murderous fury in decent and honourable men like me. I don't like knowing that I could snuff out a human life, but if I hear another sleazy mogul angling for an invite to Bono's after-party, I might embrace it and act on it.

For eleven days in September, Toronto becomes a penal colony of stupidity, glad-handing and broken dreams, and too many folks in this burg think there's something liberating in that. As a city, we embrace and celebrate our status as Hollywood's retarded cousin, and rejoice when the Big Players and Serious People come to visit. Oh, if only we all could polish Clooney's majestic knob, we could be Big and Serious, too.

You know what? You can have your brushes with glory. You can coddle and swathe your inner sycophant to your heart's content. I don't begrudge you any of it. But I make no distinction between Jeremy fucking Piven and some schizophrenic homeless boozehound when they make getting to the subway any more difficult than it already is. Actually, that's not entirely true. I recognize something approaching a soul in the boozehound. I see some of myself in him, which isn't true of the Entourage guy, who I believe is among history's nastiest monsters.

Not even my regular Roman orgies are enough to unburden me of my frustration. No fewer than two women tried heroically to drain my anger and contempt through my cock, but to no avail. That's not to say that I won't try again and again. As you well know, I'm no quitter and there's another week of this monstrosity ahead of me. There is no escape. I know that now. There's only surviving it the best one can.

Rick Perry and the song of the doomed

I've largely kept quiet about the Republican presidential field because I've decided that I don't give a shit about it. Whoever the GOP, in their current frenzy of crazed stupidity, nominates is almost certain to lose next November.

You see, the Republican Party isn't just at war with science, they also aren't overly fond of history. History teaches us that incumbent presidents are virtually impossible to beat. As I've pointed out before, incumbents over the last century have only lost if they have been faced with a primary challenge within their own party (as Taft, Ford, Carter and George H.W Bush were), a strong third party candidacy (like Taft and the first Bush saw), or the Great Depression, which took down Herbert Hoover.

Barack Obama faces none of those things. No Democrat is going to challenge an incumbent with a billion dollar war chest. It's getting awfully late in the day for an independent to gain ballot access in enough states to influence the Electoral Collage, even if there was an candidate with the influence of a Ross Perot or Theodore Roosevelt, which there isn't. Finally, the economy sucks, but there just isn't anything close to 25% unemployment. There will be within the decade, just not before 2012 is done.

That's the history, folks. And history, despite the most fervent hopes of the fucking Tea Party and their ungodly celebration of ignorance, doesn't tend to lie. Forget the fucking noise from Fox News and the idiot blogosphere. A gambling man with brains is going to put his money down on Obama. Whether he deserves to win or not is another matter entirely.

However, I'm of the considered opinion that the Republicans are basically giving this election away. The candidates that they've put forward are uniformly unserious assholes. Everything about them indicates that proud stupidity and wishful thinking are the new primary characteristics of the GOP. To say that their understanding of economics and foreign policy doesn't meet the intellectual standards of your average coloring books undeservedly disparages coloring books.

Since Mitch Daniels decided against running, there's only one Republican who I can picture in the White House without actually weeping. That's John Huntsman, and his chances of winning are about as good as mine are. And I'm a goddamn Canadian.

I'm not without problems where it comes to Huntsman. For reasons that escape me entirely, he's embraced Paul Ryan's childish budget plan, whose chances of enactment are roughly the same as my growing a fourteen inch cock out of my forehead are.

The Ryan plan, if it can even be called that, is as follows. It's frontloaded with tax cuts that explode the deficit for more than a decade and doesn't even pretend to balance the budget for thirty years. The tax cuts aren't paid for, and Medicare stays exactly the way it is for the next fifteen years or so. Chairman Ryan also studiously pretends that Social Security doesn't exist. The Ryan plan would have been fine in, say, 1985, but the United States doesn't have 30 years to get it's shit together. The last thirty years of Republican economics has turned the country in a banana republic in all but name.

If you're an American that's even remotely curious about what  balancing a budget looks like, take a gander at what Jean Chretien did in Canada in the 90s, or what David Cameron in Britain is doing now. Taxes go up and spending gets deeply cut across the board.Supply-side economics has never balanced a budget before. It has only created massive deficits. Conservatives understood that before 1980, which goes a long way in explaining why Republicans redefined conservatism after Reagan was elected. The last Republican that international economic conservatives would recognize as one of their own was Gerald Ford, with George H.W Bush getting an honorable mention from time to time.

Modern Republicans aren't conservatives: They're liberals with even more inhuman priorities. They differ from Obama only in how they want to funnel the public lucre to Wall Street kleptocrats. The current president wants to directly subsidize the criminal cocksuckers, whereas idiots like Sarah Palin want to do it through the fucking tax code. Today's welfare queens are wearing $3,000 Brooks Brothers suits. Or they're farmers. But they're all welfare queens, and the GOP wants to be their sugar daddy.

Which brings me to Rick Perry. Governor Perry might be the perfect Republican, full to the brim of what people imagine Ronald Reagan was, while remaining woefully ignorant of his actual record as both governor and president. Perry, like the overwhelming majority of modern Republicans, isn't just at war with science, he doesn't cotton well with math and history, either.

Rick is a Texan, who like most of his kind pretends to be more American than anyone else, all the while nurturing a healthy secession fetish that most reasonable people would consider treasonous. Your average balanced adult would recognize this as schitzophrenic, but, luckily for Perry, psychitary is a science, and science is something that Republican primary voters see as demonic and something that should be stuff in a well, if only they could find a well big enough.

The Governor has openly mused about seccession at least four times in the last two years, which has to be a post-Jefferson Davis record. I've read more than my share - and yours - about the life and career of George Wallace, and I can tell you that he never considered secession an option, even as he battled to preserve the evil of Jim Crow in Alabama.  More importantly, despite running four times, Governor Wallace was never considered a frontrunner for his party's presidential nomination.

Then there's his position on the issues, such as Social Security. Perry has described it as a "Ponzi scheme." And you know what? He right. The math is pretty much irrefutable on that. But even when he's right, he's an incomprehensible mess.

Here's a point that really shouldn't be overlooked. A Ponzi scheme is actually fraud, which even morons acknowledge is a crime. As a general rule, you don't allow those who profit from a crime to continue to do so. Therefore, under Perry's own reasoning, you don't allow current Social Security recipients to continue collecting benefits. Instead, you cut them off and make them pay back whatever they collected. Governor Perry doesn't want to do that, because he's an idiot, a whore, or both.

Furthermore, Perry has odd ideas about what's constitutional and what isn't. He says that Social Security is unconstitutional, but Medicaid block grants and Saturday mail delivery, to say nothing of of cleaning up after the infinite hurricanes that strike Texas, aren't. Unlike most Americans, I've actually read the U.S Constitution, and I can tell you that none of that shit is mentioned. Canadians get by just fine without Saturday mail. As s matter of fact, I was thirty years old before I realized that you crazy bastards get it at all.

Just for shits and giggles, let's look up the definition of the word "conservative" in the dictionary, shall we?

con·serv·a·tive

   /kənˈsɜrvətɪv/ Show Spelled[kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv] Show IPA

adjective

1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate.

3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit.

4. ( often initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to the Conservative party.

5. ( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Conservative Jews or Conservative Judaism.

EXPAND

6. having the power or tendency to conserve; preservative.

7. Mathematics . (of a vector or vector function) having curl equal to zero; irrotational; lamellar.

COLLAPSE

noun

8. a person who is conservative in principles, actions, habits, etc.

9. a supporter of conservative political policies.

10. ( initial capital letter ) a member of a conservative political party, especially the Conservative party in Great Britain.

11. a preservative.

Social Security has been a settled issue for nearly 80 years, and Medicare and Medicaid have been for almost 50. By pretty much anyone's definition, that would make both "existing institutions." Running on issues like that isn't conservative as much as it is revolutionary. And the idea of a conservative revolution is little more than a oxymoron.

Dwight Eisenhower understood that. He recognized the New Deal for the established institution that it then was. He also got that most voters are completely full of shit when they say that they want "change." There's a reason that Saint Ronald of Reagan doubled the payroll tax - to this day, one of the largest tax increases in American history - to save Social Security.

I find the Republican objections to ObamaCare so laughable because they're so transparently wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a lot of things, but socialist isn't one of them.On the other hand, your average Tea Partier doesn't have the first fucking clue what socialism actually is, nor did they see the irony in holding signs that said "Government hands off of Medicare" - which actually is socialist - when they were protesting the Obama plan.

ObamaCare is little more than a direct subsidy to those cocksucker HMOs. It mandates a vastly larger customer base, but maintains the insurance companies federal anti-trust exemption and has zero in the way of cost controls. There's a reason that the stock prices of health insurers hit a 50 year high the day that ObamaCare passed. It gives them the same license to print money that defense contractors currently enjoy.

Nor will they tell you that the individual mandate, which is at the heart of ObamaCare, is a Republican idea. It was first put forward by the Heritage Foundation, hardly a refuge for Mother Jones subscribers, in 1991. In 1994, nearly three dozen Republican senators voted for it as an alternative to the Clinton health care plan. That isn't a defense of the individual mandate, but those are the facts.

What Republicans and Tea Partiers are too awesomely stupid or desperately dishonest to tell you is that the Ryan Plan basically does the same thing to Medicare, except that it limits coverage instead of expanding it.  If anything, the Ryan plan is more inflationary to coverage costs than even ObamaCare is because the lack of an individual mandate doesn't broaden the coverage pool and minimize the risk to insurers. Facts are annoying things, which is why simpletons like Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are so popular with the GOP's fuckhead base. They simply make up their own facts and intellectual misfits celebrate them for it.

My reasons for hating Rick Perry are many for they are legion. Firstly, his public talk of secession makes him little more than a fiucking traitor who, in more honest times, would have been hanged. Second, I believe that he murdered an innocent man - Cameron Todd Willingham - and spent years covering it up, undermining my faith in the death penalty in the process. Third, he's a creation of Karl Rove, and Rove has never elected a candidate that didn't go on to destroy everything he touched. Fourth, Governor Perry actually personifies the Republican elevation of stupidity into a goddamned virtue. Palin and Bachmann are, if nothing else, highly fuckable, which can't be said of Perry.

Not that it matters much. Rick Perry isn't going to be the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney is. It's Romney's turn, and that's just how the GOP has operated since the days of Eisenhower. If Romney doesn't get the nod, he'd be the first runner-up from a previous cycle to not get the nomination since Bob Taft in 1952. The fact that Romney is a soulless whore of the Giuliani mold and destined to have his ass handed to him by Barack Obama is incidental.

In a lot of ways, that's too bad. The Republican Party needs to flush this nonsense out of their systems with a Goldwater scale electoral blowout every so often. It brings them back to reality.

That's not to say that Barry Goldwater would be a Tea Partier today. He was the furthest thing from it. He was for a small government across the board, including on moronic social issues that he mostly stayed the fuck away from because he understood that homosexuals are not the business of the federal government. He hated the Chritianist busybody motherfuckers that embody the Tea Party with a fury that no subsequent Republican imagines even existing today.

Senator Goldwater was nobody's victim, and he would be embarrassed by the constant squealing about sexism and racism that comes out of the Tea Party. They're more Gloria Steinem and Al Sharpton than even Steinem and Sharpton are, and I can't imagine Goldwater associating himself with that.

But Barry received a historic beating at the hands of Lyndon Johnson. Having had some sense knocked into them, the GOP went on to win seven out of the next ten presidential elections, including the two biggest landslides in American history.

Romney's going to be nominated and lose the election to Obama. But that will allow the psychotic wing of the party to pin the loss on his being a RINO. It accomplishes nothing because it allows those dickheads to continue evading reality and further embrace their own pathetic sense of victimhood.

No, the party needs to nominate one of them, and see itself get butchered from sea to shining sea. Only when the party flushes the stupid and crazy from its system will it be prepared to address the existential problems that America faces. As things are now, they don't even know what the fucking problems are.

If you're at all curious about why I've essentially abandoned this blog, that's why. There's nothing in this post that I haven't written dozens of times over the last few years, and it's almost impossible to continue giving a shit. 2012 - and everything that follows it - is going to be the most sadly predictable political event in my lifetime. And I just can't bring myself to get excited about that, especially when it doesn't wind up making a lick of difference.
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