Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Disney World moves to New Hampshire

EVERYBODY... TAKE A DEEP BREATH as the wobbly Republican caravan hauls its version of Disney World from Iowa to New Hampshire. Is this the first bogus election that nobody won? Or should we heed Mitt Romney's aides who have been declaring, "a win is a win"?

Poor Michele. She said she had wanted to witness a miracle, but dropped out in a rout, losing any claim to sainthood. But she has promised that she will not be lacking in vigor to prove that President Obama is a socialist.

We first learned of the Romney 8-vote thing sometime after midnight, after dozing during the time-killing rehashing of the night's events by the TV news panels because there were long stretches when there was nothing new to report. (I tried to sleep, but my many years of actually getting paid to report on this stuff kept my eyes sort of open.)

The rightwing Christian groups - eh, social conservatives, to be perfectly respectful about it - have found nothing to be joyful about in Iowa's wake. Such "movement" groups as Focus on the Family and American Family Assn. are planning a meeting in Texas to coalesce around a single purist who can stop Romney and his 8-vote bragging right. The internal dynamics of the GOP race will become uglier as the party stages a dreadful contest between theocracy (think Santorum ) and hypocrisy (Yep, Romney).

There is growing evidence that the holier-than-thous will be plowing up more soil in a class war against America's minorities. So when Santorum says the Feds should stop trying to assist blacks with other people's (whites') money, that is from a page in sordid George Wallace history. Or the sophistry of Gingrich's attacks on ghetto kids for having no adult models who work for a living. All this while the Repubicans are seriously suppressing voting with shouts of fraud - which, like a lot of their other shrieks, has never been proven. There are probably more pink-cheeked Wall Streeters who find ways to cheat on their income taxes.

So crank up the ferris wheel and merry-go-round in the Granite State. They're sending in the clowns. You have to ask, though, what any state has done to deserve this.

1 comment:

David Hess said...

You may be right about the pink-cheeked Wall Streeters who fudge on their personal income taxes. The real problem is the Wall Street and other corporate taxpayers who pay off Congress to help them avoid having to pay a fair share of their taxes at all. That adds up to billions in revenue losses at a time when the nation's infrastructural needs are now counted in the trillions of dollars. As for voter suppression in the guise of promoting "fair" elections, more than a dozen states (including several election-year swing states) have enacted laws and others are considering such laws to make it harder for young people, Latinos, and blacks to exercise their constitutional access to the ballot. Not to mention the Supreme Court, which in the guise of promoting free speech, redefined corporations as the equivalent of individual voters and thus free to form associations to raise billions of dollars to finance so-called "independent" political action committees (PACs) and effectively purchase the outcome of elections. More than that, such PACs are largely free of requirements to identify their contributors. If this isn't a green light to rampant election fraud, I must be color-blind. The irony here is palpable: the same folks pushing for suppression of votes are mostly the same ones who supported the Court's irrational decision in the Citizens United case. Methinks I smell a rat.