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?
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.
con·serv·a·tive[kuhn-sur-vuh-tiv]
Show IPA
adjective1. 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 letter5. ( initial capital letterEXPANDnoun8. a person who is conservative in principles, actions, habits, etc.9. a supporter of conservative political policies.10. ( initial capital letter11. a preservative.
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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