Election 2012: Vote For Zeus!

Gadfly.

Isn’t that what they call it?

Sure, gadfly, a biting pest. Incessant shrill buzzing.  Irritating whine. Gadfly.

In ancient Greek mythology the gadfly was a tormenter sent to earth by the goddess Hera. See, Hera was married to Zeus, who, as it turns out, was also her brother. Yes, back then it was totally ok for siblings to marry, just so long as they weren’t both dudes – think of Mount Olympus as the North Carolina of the ancient world. On the surface everything seemed okay, Zeus and Hera appeared at fundraisers and rallies around ancient Greece and all of the other gods thought they were your average political couple. Turns out, however, that Zeus was fooling around with one of the staffers, a chick named Io, who was into unicorns, Twilight, and making YouTube Videos.  Needless to say, when Hera heard about the affair there was some serious lightning and thunderbolts – Hades may hath no fury like a women scorned, and when the woman in question is a member of the ancient Greek pantheon and no less than the Goddess of Women and Marriage who is also known for her jealous rage and vengeful nature, let’s just say you might want to make sure your medical insurance covers reattachment of external plumbing. Zeus, of course, denied everything and tried to hide his infidelity from Hera. In an Olympian caliber act of douche-baggery, Zeus turned Io into a white heifer and then gave her to Hera as a gift. Let me repeat that, he turned his girlfriend into a cow and gave her to his wife as a token of his affection, hiding the crime in plain sight so to speak. Hera, not being a complete idiot, was not entirely fooled.  So she had the cow put in pen and guarded by Argus Panoptes, he of the hundred eyes and crappy disposition.  Now, you figure at this point Zeus would breathe a sigh of relief at not having his aforementioned external plumbing kicked into his abdominal cavity. You’d think he would firmly zip up his toga and behave himself. Nope. Remember this is the guy who turned his girlfriend into a cow. So, Zeus sends his little winged toadie, Hermes, to kill Argus.  Then Zeus proceeded to do the wild thing with Io again – who, if you recall, is now a cow. Literally. (Remember that wisecrack about North Carolina? Hello). Did I mention that Zeus was sort of a douche bag? It gets worse. Zeus managed to pull a Levi Johnson, because apparently if you’re going to kill the security guard and get it on with the livestock there’s just not much point in practicing safe sex anyway. Moo. Zeus knew that if Hera found out Io was knocked up, he was never going to hear the end of it.  So he bribed Io with money from his King-of-the-Gods campaign fund to say that the Cyclops was her baby’s father. But the truth was bound to come out sooner or later. And it did. There were pictures in the tabloids and one night Zeus came home smelling of hay and covered in milking-machine hickies.  Hilarity ensued. Hera was what they used to call in ancient world, pissed, so she conjured up the gadfly and sent it to harass Io by stinging her and buzzing about her ears and generally being an irritating little pest. 

Eventually the gadfly drove Io from Greece so Zeus could no longer find her.  I think kicking Zeus’ junk into his abdominal cavity would have been more effective (and don’t give me that bro’s before ho’s nonsense either, the guy impregnated a cow. Sorry, dude, but I have to post those pictures on your mom’s Facebook page. It’s the stupid-drunk law. No exceptions) but Hera didn’t ask me. 

Now, don’t worry about Io, eventually she went to Egypt where she wrote a moderately successful tell-all book and got a movie deal with the Lifetime Channel.

Zeus ended up alone, reviled by women the world over, protectively clutching his junk, and facing jail time.

It looked like it might be a happy ending all around, but things didn’t work out so good for Hera. 

And the Gadfly? He moved to Texas, became a politician and continued to buzz about, biting people on the ears and making a general pest of himself.

 

What does this tortured mash-up of myth, metaphor, and miscreants have to do with anything?  You’ll see.

 

In news totally unrelated to annoying gadflies, Ron Paul announced yesterday that he’s giving up active campaigning.

Supposedly he’s not suspending his campaign per se, and if conservatives choose him at the Republican Convention it’s not like he’ll turn down the nomination, but he’s not going to spend another dime trying to win the remaining state primaries.

Ron Paul’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, said very clearly that any hopes of Paul winning the Republican presidential nomination are now officially over:

"We recognize that Governor Romney has what is very likely to be an insurmountable delegate lead, and we acknowledge that we're very, very unlikely to be able to block that nomination."

In an open letter to his fans, Ron Paul said:

“Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process. We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future. Moving forward, however, we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have.”

Over on Yahoo, his supporters took the news calmly:

Ron Paul did NOT admit that! This race is about delegates. And, he's been winning delegates, despite the frauds and dirty tricks committed by Romney supporters and GOP establishment!!

MEDIA HOAX!!!!!!

Lies, lies lies! He did NOT end his campaign and his TRUE supporters know this! Media liars are spreading lies again like wildfire!

He did not drop out!! he's still in the running, just focusing on delegate conventions and not popular votes... which is a good strategy bc delegates are what matter!!!

Talk about yellow journalism!!!! Their is a video on his website about these false claims!!! he is not going to waste money on advertising in Primary states, like Florida, which Romney spent 50 million dollars in. Anyone stupid enough to voter for Romney, he has one, no need to vote in primaries. Take the time off to smoke some more crack, or sniff Mitt's magic underwear!!!

More Lame Stream Media Lies.......Ron has alot more delegates than they lead you to believe maybe even more than Romney now..

Ron Paul has not quit the race, retards!!!

I will write in Ron Paul with my own blood if I have to!

I don’t know about you guys, but here in Alaska where I vote they give you a little pencil so you can darken in the circles on your ballot, you generally don’t have to use your own circulatory fluid – unless you’re voting for Satan. But I digress. As I said previously, if these people move en masse to a compound in the fetid jungles of Guyana and start eating each other and setting themselves on fire, I won’t be even remotely surprised.

Intervention from the ancient gods notwithstanding, Ron Paul is done. He’s been done for a long time, he sees it now even if his rabid supporters don’t. 

And what we’re left with is exactly the 2012 election I predicted a year ago, Obama vs Romney. 

Note that I do not claim any special powers of political prediction, unusual insight, penetrating perception, or any other such juju magics. And I certainly wasn’t the only one to predict that conservatives would end up with Romney right from the very start. Despite the protestations of the Paulistas, Romney’s ascendance isn’t the result of some vast media conspiracy or a deal with the Devil, rather his pending nomination was perfectly predictable for a number of reasons not the least of which were organization, political savvy, the ability to reinvent himself, lots and lots of money, and, of course, perfect hair. 

But most of all, I knew he’d be the GOP candidate because Romney is a moderate (for a conservative.  Bear with me for a minute).

The majority of conservatives are not, in fact, insane. The majority of conservatives are not actually slobbering extremists, glassy-eyed religious nuts, frothy barking bigots, or powdered wig wearing jingoistic nationalist war mongers who eat paint chips and draw pictures on the wall with their own feces. When it comes right down to it, most conservatives, whether they want to admit it or not, are more or less moderates – just like most liberals are. Oh sure, they’ll scream and holler and weep and wail and rail and rage against socialism and communists and Nazis and Change and the debt and big government and illegal aliens and the current generation and the homos and abortion and the lack of funding for the orbital Jesus Death Beam of Death, but they almost always pick the moderate – especially if he’s got the best haircut.

As I mentioned in a previous post, given this year’s line-up, who did conservatives pick? The guy most like Obama. Yep.

Back in 2008, who were the conservative candidates? John McCain, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Keyes, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, and some other bit players like Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul.  Who’d conservatives pick? John McCain.  Is McCain a moderate? Compared to Huckabee, Tancredo, and Keyes?  One of the main reasons McCain picked a blathering rightwing boob as his running mate was because the extremists in his party pegged him as too moderate.

2000, George W. Bush  up against McCain, Keyes, Orin Hatch, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, Steve Forbes, Liz Dole, Dan Quayle, and some other riff raff like Herman Cain. Dubya a moderate? Again, compared to Alan Keyes and Pat Buchanan, yes.  And remember back in 2000 Bush was considered mostly harmless by conservatives, a not-so-bright wimpy lesser version of his wimpy father – that’s why they picked Cheney as his running mate, to man him up. Nobody thought Bush would turn out to be a war mongering evangelical nutjob (OK, mostly nobody, present company excluded) – that was how most conservatives saw McCain, war hero, veteran, and son of admirals.

1996, we had Bob Dole who beat out Buchanan, Forbes, Alexander, and Keyes. Dick Lugar, Phil Gramm, and some folks you’ve never heard of barely even appeared on the ballot.  Both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were courted for the nomination, both couldn’t raise enough popular interest (any) or enthusiasm (ditto) and so they declined. Ross Perot acted as a spoiler, I hear Bob Dole eggs Perot’s car and leaves a bag of flaming dog poop on his porch each November 3rd in thanks (Hallmark still doesn’t make a card for costing somebody else the election, can you believe it? Given the comments from Yahoo above, there seems to be a market).

1992, George H. W. Bush was running for a second term.  Republicans decided to keep him despite offers from Pat Buchanan and David Duke to go up against Bill Clinton.  In ’88 it was Vice President Bush vs. Dole, Robertson, Jack Kemp, Alexander Haig (remember him? This guy makes Cheney look like a gay peacenik vegetarian), Rumsfeld, and so on.  Hell, even Ronald Reagan in 1980 appealed to both sides of the political spectrum and he’s widely viewed as way too liberal to get the GOP nomination today (but he probably would).

Democrats are no different.  Given the choice between leftwing extremism and a moderate, they’ll choose the moderate every time – and it doesn’t hurt if he has good hair either.

The middle majority of Americans, left and right, aren’t all that different in their political beliefs. 

Yes, yes, I know, heresy!

But the simple truth of the matter is that most people on both sides are moderates, otherwise they’d be killing each other in the streets and lighting shit on fire.

People are creatures of habit. For a lot of Americans, political affiliation has less to do with actual ideology and more to do with inertia, i.e. they’re republicans or democrats because their parents were republicans or democrats. They get all frothy about things that don’t affect them in any way whatsoever, things like abortion and gay marriage and gun ownership, because their politicians tell them too. They get all emotional and filled with righteous rage but they don’t really give their positions much actual thought.  I know plenty of conservatives who aren’t even a little bit religious, believe that a woman has the right to choose, think that gays should be allowed to marry (or at least have equal privileges and rights through civil unions), want the war to end and the military budget reduced, and think we ought to do more to curb in Wall Street excess and help the poor up to and including universal healthcare (Note that Mitt Romney once advocated for all of those things too, right up until he started running for King of the Conservatives). LIberals are no different.  Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than when people start hurling insults at each other over how the GOP freed the slaves and how the Democrats are all secretly members of the KKK, or how all liberals are baby killers and how all conservatives are slobbery Jesus freaks. For most of us, we belong to a particular party because we’ve always belonged to a particular party. Period. Most Americans think about politics the same way they regard their favorite sports team, I live here so I root for this particular team who my dad also rooted for and who therefore must be the most awesome team ever no matter what. All other teams have sex with cows. That’s it and that’s all and I’ll punch you in the face if you say otherwise. If you don’t like my team, move to Canada, Traitor!

Romney has been widely pilloried due to what is now a classic political gaffe by one of his aides, Eric Fehrnstrom, who opined that the campaign would be like an Etch-A-Sketch if Romney won the nomination, i.e. they would have to shake it up and start over for the general election.

Fehrnstrom probably shouldn’t have said that out loud, but he was, of course, absolutely right. 

The candidate who wins a primary is not the candidate who wins the general election. 

To win a state primary, you have to look like whatever flavor of gibbering baboon-assed extremist the local yokels want.  Gays? Hate ‘em!  Muslims? Nuke ‘em!  Tar sands? Drill ‘em! Jesus? Love ‘em!  Poor people? Screw ‘em!  Moderates and undecideds and independents and the other party can’t vote in your primary in most cases anyway.  Indeed, most of the folks who actually can vote in the primaries don’t bother to show up. Who does that leave? Who shows up wearing red, white, and blue at your caucus and conventions? Right. Exactly. To win the nomination, you have to appeal to those people, the nuts. But even then, who do these people pick given the choice? Nine times out of ten, they vote for the moderate. They might not like the moderate, but they know the extremists can’t win the general election. Because to win a general election, especially in an election like this one, you had better appeal to the centrists, the people in the middle of the political spectrum – not blue, not red, but purple – i.e. the moderates.

To the right, Obama looks like an extremist.

To the left, Romney looks like an extremist.

But the truth of the matter is that they’re both moderates and not all that different.

Six months ago, my conservative friends were spitting nails over “that communist bastard, Romney. He’s just like Obama!” He’s an elitist. He’s too moderate. He’s a progressive. He’s got a funny religion. He’s socialist. He’s for big government.  We could never ever vote for Romney!  Six months ago, Mitt Romney was the anti-Christ.  Now Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich have all endorsed him.  Ron Paul hasn’t yet, but he will – unless he decides to run as an independent.  Christian leaders, former Republican presidents, prominent conservative pundits and personalities, they’ve all jumped on the Romney bandwagon. What changed? Is Romney less rich today? Is he any less the prep-school snob? Is he less Mormon? Is he less progressive. Is he less moderate?  What?

Were conservatives wrong about Romney when they said he wasn’t a real conservative?  When they said all that stuff about him six months ago?

Here’s a question, if they were wrong about Romney could they be wrong about Obama?

Heh, heh, no. Of course not. Obama belongs to the other side! He’s got a funny religion! He’s an elitist! He’s a progressive. He’s a moderate! He’s for big government! He’s a socialist! Oh no, no, no, we could never ever endorse him!

Most Americans would vote for Mutant Cannibal Hitler’s Robot Head in a pickle jar full of human baby juice, just so long as it belonged to their party.

I strongly suspect that if the only thing different about Barack Obama was his political party – and he was currently standing in Mitt Romney’s shoes – he’d be cheered just as loudly in Tampa.

Or just as diffidently.

While a lot of conservatives will eventually vote for Romney, they aren’t all that thrilled with him.  Which is, of course, something else they have in common with liberals – because while most liberals will vote for Obama’s reelection, many of them aren’t all that thrilled with him either.

The 'lesser of two evils' argument is what got us in the mess in the first place. Both parties are evil and both are controlled by the same interests. It's time for a real choice.

I will no longer vote for the "lesser" of two evils. Romney is no different than McCain, who is just as liberal as Obama..

Romney and Obama serve the same Federal Reserve, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg interests. I ain't voting. Let Obama win for all I care. This country deserves to go over the cliff. Constitution!?!?!? Say wha??? America deserves what is coming

I will do the right thing because it IS the right thing... I will vote for or write in Ron Paul. And if Corporate America brings in a new pawn or retains the Kenyan, I'll be moving to Costa Rica. Freedom isn't a gift and noone seems worthy of it here anymore

Wish more people would see that Obama and Romney are the same.

Obama or Romney and we really aren't moving ahead as a country. Really quite sad that we are forced to choose like this. Free elections. Sad

It takes us older folks to get the idea. We are in for an ugly campaign and it does not matter who wins we are in the last days. Jesus is coming back for sure and we are all going to suffer. It is written!

It is written? Probably in blood, I’m guessing.

Seems to me this Yahoo commenter sums up the basic sentiment best:

What you people don't seem to understand, is that Romney will be NO better then Obama! Most of they're policies are the same! Only difference is that Romney wants to cut taxes for the wealthy and also cut social programs for the poor and elderly. Obama on the other hand wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and keep the social programs for the poor and elderly. And the republican establishment are warmongers and would keep the wars going and probably expand them. Obama is NOT the peace candidate he claimed to be, but at least we're NOT dropping bombs on Iran yet! Either one will lead to worse conditions for MOST Americans. DO NOT VOTE FOR EITHER ONE OF THESE BOUGHT AND PAID FOR CANDIDATES! Vote for a third party candidate NOT owned by the elite! […] We must NOT vote for the establishment candidates ever again!

OK.

So, if not a republican and not a democrat, and since Not-Republican Republican Ron Paul is out, then who?

I have a suggestion.

 

John Edwards.

 

No, no, think about it for a minute.

Sure, he used to be a democrat, but now neither mainstream political party will claim him.

In fact, nobody is going to endorse John Edwards, nobody, not Wall Street, not the Bilderbergs or the Secret Illuminati Masters of the New World Order, not the League of Women Voters (and they endorsed Clinton, think about that for a minute). Not Rush Limbaugh or John Stewart (Leno might, but nobody listens to him anyway).  Talk about independent – seriously, nobody will admit to knowing this guy. Edwards? Never heard of him. Nope.

We won’t need to worry about big money influencing John Edwards, because, seriously, who’s going to give this guy money? There you go.

Extramarital affairs, secret love child, misappropriation of funds, cover-ups, shifting the blame onto subordinates, crazy ex-mistress, scandal to beat all Oval Office blowjobs, lawyer, this guy has it all.  Seriously, what’s he going to do in office that would surprise you in any way? No really. While running for President of the United States under intense media scrutiny, Edwards had an affair and got his girlfriend pregnant while his own wife was dying from breast cancer and then he convinced one of his staff members to claim the baby was his by bribing the man’s wife with campaign contributions.  Seriously, how could Edward top that? Ever.  This guy could have jungle monkey sex with a cow in the middle of the Rose Garden while smoking crack with Marion Barry and Rod Blagojevich on a giant rug made of aborted fetuses and thousand dollar bills looted from Saddam Hussein’s treasury and the media would just sigh and print, President Edwards: Still A Douchebag.

Nixon’s secret tapes were a bunch of crotchety old white guys talking about money and their prostates, Reagan’s were about starting a war in some malaria infested shithole most Americans don’t care about and couldn’t find on a map, Ford mostly just hummed to himself and stared out the window, Bush’s were reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Edwards’ secret tape was a porn movie! The guy is a natural, talk about setting the bar!

We make Edwards president, nobody, and I mean nobody, will have any overinflated expectations.  At all. If this guy even lives through his term, it’ll be more than anybody expects. Seriously, he couldn’t possibly let any of us down.

I’ve already explained how we can save money on the vice president, think of the savings if we make Edwards president.

See, the way to bet here is that John Edwards is going to go to prison, right?

Which means that we already have to pay for his maintenance and upkeep.  It costs, what? about $50K per year to keep a minimum security prisoner in America? Less if you don’t feed him regularly. And they can pay some of that back by making license plates, doing laundry, and giving out oral gratification in the shower. Much, much cheaper than the current presidential salary.  

People are always bitching about the President taking vacations on the public dime. No need to worry about that with a federal prisoner, he’s on the clock 24/7/365.  And even if he gets some furlough he’ll be wearing an ankle monitor, it’s not like he’ll be jetting off to Hawaii or Maine. 

Speaking of travel, no more paying for Air Force One, if he needs to go somewhere too far for the prison bus he can always ride Con Air. 

Federal prisoners come with their own security detail, no need for the Secret Service (Insert your own prostitute joke here). 

We won’t have to pay the tab at Bethesda anymore either, prisoners already get inexpensive healthcare and free prostate exams.

Edwards can opt to learn a valuable skill in prison, like small engine repair or tax return preparation, so that he can find employment upon release after his term is up. He doesn’t get retirement, he gets parole contingent on finding a job.

By definition, any interactions with lobbyists and other such influence peddlers will be monitored – it says so right on the visiting room wall in big red letters.

Finding common ground with members of Congress should be easy, since so many of them are familiar with the penal system already.

Talk about leadership answerable to the people. This guy gives us any guff, we’ll spray him with a cold fire hose and throw him into the Isolation Unit for a week or two. 

And of course, he’s got good hair.

John Edwards is looking at thirty years, folks. We do this right and we’ll have three decades of peace without having to listen to political attack ads and campaign speeches.  Ah, the light comes on, does it? And you thought I was crazy.

Seriously, most Americans already suspect politicians are lying criminal scumbags. 

With Edwards we don’t have to wonder, we’ll know.

And remember, if Edwards doesn’t work out there’ll be no need for a lengthy and expensive impeachment.

No, instead we can always have Scooter Libby shank him in the kidney for a pack of smokes.

 

This Election, remember the Stonekettle Station motto: Don’t just embrace the crazy, sidle up next to it and lick its ear.

And stay away from the cows. Really, I’m warning you.

Tomatoes

This is an updated reprint of an article I posted here four years ago.  Happy Mother’s Day – Jim

---

Have you ever been in a long-term relationship, marriage or otherwise, where you know your partner as well as you know yourself?

You know everything about them; their likes, dislikes, childhood friends, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what pisses them off. You know how they'll react to anything. You've heard their stories a hundred times, but you still listen to them even if they bore you to tears. You know what kind of toothpaste they prefer and how much sugar to put in their coffee.

Yeah, like that.

And then, out of the blue, you learn something entirely new about them?

Like first date new. Like, Wow! Me too! new.

My wife and I are just about as good a fit as two people can be. We were a blind date, and by the end of that date we both had mutually decided that the two of us were going to get married- but, it was, oh, about a week or so before either of us mentioned it to the other. And by then we barely had to, because it was just so obvious that's where we were going. We've been married twenty years now, and I'd say we know each other pretty well indeed - if for no other reason than we've traveled literally tens of thousands of miles, thousands of hours, cooped up in in a car together. A lot of it through places like the Yukon and the Northwest Territories where there are no radio stations - as such, you'd think just about every possible subject of conversation would have come up by now.

Apparently not.

We grew up widely separated. I was born and raised in the western part of Michigan's lower peninsula, where people eat oatmeal with margarine and brown sugar for breakfast and speak proper American English. My wife was born in New York, but raised in the panhandle of Florida, where people eat grits with butter and salt for breakfast and speak in an incomprehensible dialect centered around variations of the all-purpose contraction "y’all." Where I grew up, there are two types of regular daily gravy, Brown and Chicken, and two types of holiday gravy, Turkey and Ham. Where my wife grew up, there is only one kind of gravy, White, and you eat it on everything. Where I grew up, about the only fried food was chicken, which came in a cardboard bucket when mom was too tired to cook, and the occasional pan-fried bluegill or perch. In my wife's household, everything was breaded and fried - and covered in white gravy. In the North we didn't barbeque, we "grilled out" in the backyard. In the South, BBQ is a complex art-form utilizing arcane and highly secret methodology involving smoke, pork, liquor, and several pickup trucks full of drunken rednecks. In the South they eat "greens." In the North, we know grass clippings when we see them and we feed that shit to the livestock.

So, food-wise you wouldn't think we have a lot in common.

Not so.

We both purely detest tomatoes. Loath is not nearly a strong enough word. We can't stand 'em, neither one of us. This hatred is the bond, the glue, that holds us together and gives us strength against a hostile and tomato loving world. It has kept us together for twenty something years and I suspect that we will be buried together at some indeterminate future date far removed from the tomato cultivating regions of the world.

Strangely, I do like ketchup, only the good kind, but my wife won't touch it. And both of us will eat tomato sauce on certain things such as pizza and lasagna, but only if there's not too much of it and it's not too tomatoey (that’s a totally real word, look it up) and under no circumstance can there be any stinking chunks of tomato in the sauce. Ugh.

I know that you will find this distaste strange and incomprehensible. My wife and I do realize that it is entirely possible that we are the only two people on the planet who hate tomatoes, and we're good with that. Hell, even my own mother simply can't believe that I find tomatoes revolting, and I'm sure that both of my parents wonder if the hospital screwed up and gave them the wrong baby.

See, my folks love tomatoes. Absolutely love the goddamned things. They eat tomatoes all of the time, stewed, canned, sliced, diced, pickled, juiced, on a chair with a bear and in a house with a mouse.

Now my mom often made things that I loved - but, at least once a week we'd have something with tomatoes in it and I could barely stand the smell, let alone choke down dinner. God forbid there would be stewed tomatoes - which my dad relishes with great gusto. Retch. The smell alone made me want to vomit. (Dad also loves lima beans. Seriously, who the hell likes lima beans? Maybe the hospital did screw up)

However, the good news is that if the tomatoes were a side dish, like the stewed variety, I was allowed to take a pass.

The bad news, of course, was that if tomatoes were part of the main course, well I was required to eat them. Usually, I could pick around them, or push them to the side, but there was one dish that I feared and hated above all else. One dish that my mother made at least once a month that I dreaded and feared and despised. One dish that I could not avoid or work around. One dish that the mere thought of, forty years later, makes me shudder. I haven't thought about it in years, you might even call it one of those 'repressed memories' shrinks are so fond of. Childhood trauma, long repressed - and, I thought, unique to me because I've never seen or heard of it in any other household. I would, of course, take as little as possible of it. And I would push it around the plate and spread it out as much possible to make it look like I was actually eating it - all the while contemplating thoughts of running away to join the circus where I would eat nothing but corn dogs and cotton candy. My mother, of course, was not fooled by these diversionary tactics. A child of The Great Depression and of frugal Dutch extraction - she'd make damned sure you cleaned your plate no matter how painfully long it took - and it often took forever. Which led, inevitably, to the stern matronly lecture of starving children in Africa and the fact that I should be grateful that I had anything to eat at all. But try as I might, I could never be grateful for that particular meal. Ever.

All of which which brings me to this: The other day I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. As usual, my wife was sitting on a stool behind the island, and we were talking about our day. And for some reason, the subject of our mutual tomato hatred came up. And my wife casually mentioned a certain dish her mother used to make, which my wife hated and despised and was traumatized by and contemplated running away to join the circus to avoid.

It was none other than my own childhood nemesis!

Have you figured it out yet?

Yes, it's that revolting 1960's, lower middle class, blue-collar staple: American Hamburger Goulash.

For those of you not familiar with this dish, it is a horrifying abomination of hamburger, onions, green peppers, elbow macaroni, and stewed tomatoes. I would cheerfully burn Betty Cocker's checkered apron in effigy for perpetuating this putrescent sin against culinary nature. If there is any 'American Comfort Food' more disturbing and less comforting than this repugnant atrocity I don't know what it is, unless it is the 1970's school lunch version commonly called 'schoolash' - a salmonella seasoned mix of grade-B leftover burger patties, macaroni, and tomato soup warmed to the temperature of an hour-dead corpse by a bank of heat lamps and dehydrated to the consistency of old toenails by the hair-netted expertise of sadistic lunch ladies. Often served with 'garlic toast' made from yesterday's hamburger buns and some kind of industrial urinal disinfectant.

I haven't thought about goulash in years and, yeah, it's a small thing. But, more than two decades my wife and I have been married, and I just now discovered that she had almost exactly the same childhood experience as I - and nearly identical comments regarding it. Something new in conversation. Something that tells me she'll always surprise me. And it's just one more thing that tells us how good of a match we are. Her hatred of American Hamburger Goulash is just one more thing that I love about her. One more thing that makes me wonder what else is left to discover about the woman I can't imagine life without.

So, yeah, after all these years I guess I finally am grateful for the damned goulash.

So thanks, Mom, for giving me just one more reason to love your daughter in law.

Love and War

As noted in the previous post, conservatives have declared the direction of forward to be fascist communism.

Or was it communist fascism?

I can never remember if the Marxists were Nazis or if the Nazis were communists. 

Either way, accordingly North Carolina, not wanting to be labeled either communist or fascist, voted yesterday not only to not move forward – or even to remain in the same place for that matter –  but to, in fact, actually take a couple of giant steps firmly backwards.  It wasn’t enough that they denied granting certain citizens equal rights, they also voted to take away existing rights from a significant portion of their population.

Yep.

See, apparently after it was all over a number of bemused North Backward Carolinians were surprised to find out that they’d not only outlawed same-sex marriage but had also made civil unions illegal (for both gay and straight relationships).

Oops.

If ever you needed an abject lesson why any individual’s civil rights should not be something decided by ballot (besides, you know, that whole black people are property thing. Or women’s suffrage. Yeah, besides that I mean), yesterday’s vote in North Carolina would be a perfect example.

As I’ve said repeatedly here on Stonekettle Station, I have yet to have anybody explain to me how two gay people getting married affects me or my traditional marriage in any way whatsoever – or anybody else’s traditional marriage either for that matter.  They haven’t because they can’t, not that that simple fact makes them stop and think – being as thinking isn’t exactly something religious extremists do very well.  I have yet to have anybody explain to me why any legally consenting adult shouldn’t be able to marry any other legally consenting adult regardless of gender and call it “marriage” if they damned well please. They haven’t because, as I mentioned previously, they cannot.   And I have yet to hear any opposition to same-sex marriage that doesn’t, sooner or later (usually sooner), invoke somebody’s God.  Because the simple truth of the matter is that when you strip away all the bullshit, what it comes down to is a bunch of selfish bastards attempting to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us.

In the United States, if you can’t frame your argument without invoking your religion, you don’t in point of fact actually have an argument, you’re just being an asshole.

Here in America, denying any legally consenting pair of adults the right to marry because it’s against the tenets of somebody’s Bronze Age belief system is no different whatsoever than snatching random citizens off the street and forcing them to join your church.  Denying gay people the right to marry because Christians don’t like it is no different whatsoever from Muslims demanding that pork be outlawed nationwide and that all American women should have to go about with their faces covered.  It’s absolutely no different from American Catholics demanding that nobody can eat meat on Fridays because some senile old pedophile in a pointy hat says it makes Jesus cry.  The only, the only, time that religion should have any bearing on anybody’s civil rights is if it affects you directly, i.e. if you don’t agree with same-sex marriage because you believe that two thousand years ago some wild-eyed hippy with delusions of grandeur and a pocket full of magic fairy dust said it was bogus, dude, fine, then you have the absolute right not to marry anybody of the same sex as yourself – but that’s as far as it goes. You don’t get to tell the rest of us what to do. Period.  And don’t start in with that Christian morality bullshit either, or I will spend the next ten posts describing numerous examples of your religion’s endless immoral hypocrisy in intimate detail – and we’ll start with the aforementioned guy in the pointy hat.

Here’s the bottom line:

If a bunch of religious nuts can vote away your fundamental civil rights, then your rights are not self-evident, inalienable, or endowed by God. Quod erat demonstrandum.

It’s really just this simple: if men can dictate your civil rights based on their religious and/or political beliefs, then God isn’t the all powerful deity he claims to be and any rights he supposedly endows are worthless trash, or the founding principles of the United states – i.e. the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens – are utter and complete bullshit, or (and here’s a thought) you are wrong. 

Want to take a guess as to which is more likely?

So, anyway, hot on the heels of the North Backward Carolina vote, today the president said he thinks gay people should be allowed to get married.

Predictably, conservative pundits, politicians, preachers, and pinheads went absolutely apeshit. 

The folks over at Fox Nation deployed their Jesus Powered Orbital Gay-Shield and stridently sounded panicked battle stations, declaring on Twitter:

OBAMA FLIP FLOPS, DECLARES WAR ON MARRIAGE!

Oh noes!

War?

On marriage?

Obama declares war on marriage. 

War.

Ah hell, not another damned war. Seriously? 

I thought we were done with that nonsense for a while – especially since Jeb Bush decided not to run for president.

So what’s reasoning here?  Did a bunch of traditional marriage extremists fly a jetliner into one of our buildings? Did One Man and One Woman bomb Pearl Harbor or invade Poland? Are traditional marriages hotbeds of terrorism and anti-American sentiment?  Did traditional marriage attack one of our allies or endanger our oil supply?  Did traditional marriage take one of our embassies hostage? Has traditional marriage been attacking our merchant ships on the high seas and impressing our sailors into their navy? Did traditional marriage nationalize the pineapple industry or attempt to burn down the Alamo? Do we want to build a canal through the middle of traditional marriage. What the hell is it this time?

Are traditional marriages hiding weapons of mass destruction?

That’s it, isn’t it?

Next thing you know, Obama will send Hilary Clinton to testify before the United Nations.  She’ll use CIA intelligence and a big flip chart to prove how traditional marriage hasn’t been complying with UN sanctions and how marriage hasn’t been cooperating with inspectors. 

 

Traditional Marriage, Clinton will tell the UN Security Council, is trying to build a Bomb.

 

Reluctantly, the UN will vote for war (and for once, those French pussies will be cheering us on! China and Russia will protest, of course, they’ve always been in bed with traditional marriage). We’ll rename Russian Dressing to Queer Vinaigrette and dip our Freedom Fries in it!

Joe Biden will be dispatched to an undisclosed location, not some high tech bunker beneath the Naval Observatory or the old Cold War facility under Weather Mountain, no it’ll be a bath house Command Post in the Castro District. 

This time people will listen to The Dixie Chicks and The Nuge will be vilified as anti-American and a traitor.

Rachel Maddow will become the voice of war, Forward, Girls, crush traditional marriage beneath our Doc Martens!

As Commander in Chief, Obama can’t wait for Congress to act – the threat from traditional marriage is too immediate and dire.  Besides the War Powers Act gives him the right to attack without congressional approval. He’ll call out the National Guard and deploy the drones.  He’ll order the Navy to begin bombardment of traditional marriage from offshore, followed by a Marine amphibious landing (Little known fact, the Navy actually has an aircraft, the EA-6B, nicknamed The Queer. Coincidence? Or has the military industrial complex been preparing for this all along?)  B-2 Spirit bombers will launch laser guided anti-marriage missiles.  In an awesome display of military might, the B-52’s will deploy the thunderous Rolling Divorce, carpet bombing marriage into smithereens!

That’s why Obama really ended the war in Iraq and is drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, you know, so that he can redeploy our troops in the war on marriage.  It’s true!

Obama’s sparkly rainbow-camouflaged troops will march across the land and the forces of traditional marriage will throw down their weapons and flee.  Shock and awe, folks, shock and awe. Together we’ll tear down the wedding chapels, and they’ll cheer us in the streets of Raleigh!

It’ll be fabulous!

Of course, if history is any guide (heh heh, right), traditional marriage will retreat to mountain caves and hidden lairs, and we’ll face a decade of insurgency, underwear bombers, Improvised Jesus Devices, and holy water attacks on gay people. 

War on marriage. Frankly I don’t see this ending well. 

Then again, you know, maybe it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

No really, think about it, conservatives love war.  It’s their most favorite hobby.

Maybe declaring war on traditional marriage is how Obama convinces conservatives to give gay people equal rights.  Well, sure, if it’s war, we’re in.  Let me get my gun and gas up the Hummer. For Freeeedom!

Crazy? Maybe, but it’s not half as crazy as some of the nonsense I’ve heard this week.

 

Of course, if it works out, Mitt Romney will probably want to take credit for it.

Gay marriage, totally my idea.  Totally.

OMG! Nazis! Nazis Everywhere!

 

Last week the Obama campaign released their new campaign slogan:

Forward

That’s the new slogan, Forward.

The Obama campaign likes simple one-word slogans and given today’s sound bite mentality that’s very likely a good idea.

Forward.

I probably wouldn’t have gone with Forward myself. In my mind it’s not really as inspiring as the campaign’s previous one word slogan, Hope.  Plus, the word hope only has one syllable, forward has two and the campaign risks losing the undecided vote with such a lengthy message.  If they were going to use a direction as a campaign slogan, for the majority of Americans it probably would have been better if they just grunted and pointed (of course pointing is fraught with risk too, you don’t want to get caught gesturing towards Canada, or worse Mexico. You know, on second thought, never mind).

So, anyway, Forward.

Moving toward the front, forward.

As in the direction that one is facing or traveling. Forward.

Into the future. Forward.

Seems harmless enough, right?

Forward.

For those of you who didn’t watch the video (because, Dread Cthulhu, Man, it’s like seven minutes long!), it begins by summarizing the grim situation President Obama inherited from the previous administration when he took office three years ago. The video then lists the president’s numerous accomplishments, both foreign and domestic, and goes on to mention that Obama managed to accomplish all of that in spite of the deliberate and sustained obstructionism of media pundits, truthers, birthers, flat-earthers, bug-eaters, loons, goons, poltroons, and congressional Republicans (my personal favorite is that little smirk on Mitch McConnell’s sallow pasty face. If Obama does get reelected, I’m going to enjoy watching him eat those words). 

The video concludes with the president’s ringing endorsement of the middle class and the American dream and of the United States itself.

“Hard work, determination, real results,” says the voiceover.

Hard work plus determination equals results, isn’t that what so many conservatives have been saying for the last three years?

OK, sure it comes out sounding like “Get a job, Hippies!” and “Screw you, I got mine,” but isn’t that exactly what republicans have been saying?  Work hard and you’ll be rewarded, forward to the American dream, right? There are plenty of jobs, you just need to get off your dead lazy socialist ass and go get one. Work hard and maybe someday you too can make millions liquidating companies and sending jobs overseas.

The clear and obvious message behind the above video is that while the president feels we’ve come a long way during these last three years, there is still much more – economically, domestically, and in the foreign policy arena – to be done in the coming years.  We'll need to work hard, stay the course, and eventually we’ll be back on top.

The video ends with one word: Forward.

Forward, isn’t that exactly the direction conservatives have been giving Obama for the last three years? Forward. Quit looking backward. Quit blaming Bush.  Quit complaining about the mess left by previous administrations and Wall Street and the banks and business. We need to stop talking about the past and start moving forward to the future.

Forward, it doesn’t get anymore American than that, right?

 

Yeah, American all right, American communist.

Forward, my easily amused electronic friends, is actually a totally secret hidden code word for socialism, communism, Nazis, godless baby eating atheism, Illuminati, shiny shaven vajazzled harlots running rampant in the streets, Canadians, mass abortions, Muslims, poison arrows falling from the sky, Justin Beiber, sissy electric cars, Marxists, the Anti-Christ, militant vegetarianism, death panels, FEMA labor camps, the Metric System, lite beer, the Lifetime Channel, and the sparkly nacho-cheese flavored fabulously stylish rainbow-colored gay agenda.

It’s totally true.

No, really it is. 

Forward = Commies.

 

Hello?

 

Whoa, Jim, I hear you say at last in that cautiously placating voice you use when you think I’ve been mixing drain-cleaner and recreational narcotics again and you’re frantically trying to find the number for emergency mental health services while keeping me calm long enough for the guys with the stun guns and pepper spray to arrive. What’s that you say, Jim? Forward is a communist slogan? Sure. Whatever you say, Chief, just stay right there and don’t worry about those sirens.

OK, you’re skeptical.

Fine. Be that way. Go on then, don’t take my word for it.

Instead listen to Glenn Beck ferret out Obama’s secret totally hidden plan to use his Magic Negro-Ray and the secret armies of Communist Cannibal Death Nazis of Death to achieve absolute world domination (WARNING: you may actually feel yourself devolving into a more primitive life-form during the following video.  Those who are already running a brain cell deficit are strongly cautioned to skip the video, otherwise you may end up as a bowl of pudding):

Did you make it through the video? (If you’re suffering brain spasms, watch this. The nausea and vomiting will pass eventually)

Sure, to the untrained eye, Beck sounds like gibberish, the kind of booger-eating Palinesque random word salad stream of consciousness generated by an unhinged under-medicated paranoid, of course it does.  But remember, Glenn Beck is also the guy who discovered Nazis in Grandpa’s Medicare, Marxism in ancient Babylon, and secret communists at FEMA. Say what you like, Beck knows his way around a conspiracy theory (it’s also likely that he knows his way around a drain cleaner and narcotic highball, but I digress).

Besides, it’s not just Glenn Beck, folks.  Fox Nation, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, why all sorts of totally reliable sources agree.

Want more proof?

Over on ZIMBIO, there’s a compelling piece titled:  Obama Campaign Slogan "Forward" or "Vorwärts". Think Karl Marx.  The author, a intellectual giant and obvious expert on all matters historical, explains how Obama’s slogan “Forward” is the same as “Vorwärts” which a is German for “Forward.” 

Ah ha!

What? 

What do you mean you don’t see it? Dude, look: Forward = Vorwärts.

No? Try harder.

Forward = Vorwärts = Forward = Vorwärts = Forward, shake, lather (emphasis on lather), repeat. 

Still nothing, eh? Here, drink some of this drain cleaner.

Look, English has a word for Forward. German has a word for Forward. Coincidence? Not likely.  English = German and German = Nazis and if English equals German and German equals Nazis then America equals Nazis, Q.E.D. That’s math, folks. Math don’t lie, that’s in the Bible and you can look it up.

Get it now?

The only good logic is the circular kind, folks. Take another slug of that drain cleaner and pass the bottle around, tastes like tea doesn’t it? Mmmm, good.

Vorwärts.

Now if those filthy socialist umlauts weren’t condemnation enough, Vorwärts is also the name of a song sung by the Hitler Youth back in old communist Nazi Germany. 

That’s right, Hitler Youth.

Oh, now the light comes on, does it? Hitler’s Nazi fascists and Karl Marx’s communists were Best Friends ForEVAH.  That’s right. Everybody knows that, everybody whose history textbooks were printed in Texas anyway.

It’s pretty hard to argue with that kind of logic, isn’t it?

You bet it is.

You drink enough drain cleaner and you start to see things in a whole new light.

Forward? Why it’s like Obama is just rubbing your face in it, isn’t it? Who did he praise in that video? Teachers? Firemen? Police? Autoworkers? College students, women, construction workers? The middle class. Communists one and all!  Who did he condemn? That’s right, banks, Wall Street, Oil Companies! Real Americans. Obama hates capitalism!

Ended the war?

Killed Osama?

You know who else ended a war in Afghanistan and tried to kill Osama bin Ladin? I’ll tell you, the Soviets! 

Except those Russian commies failed, Obama actually did it.  Sweet Nacho-Flavored Jesus, Obama is a better communist than the Soviet Union!

Wait, hold on, what’s this?

Holy Hell! Forward is the motto of Wisconsin! Wisconsin is communist!  We’ve been eating Marxist cheese! Is that a Russian Bear under the Nazi Forward banner? I think it is (What? It’s a badger not a bear you say? Yeah and what animal did the USSR name their atomic bombers after?)  God’s hairy belly button, look at that damned picture, hammer, arm, plow, two gay guys, it’s like you can feel yourself being indoctrinated into the Nazi Communist Party of Socialist Fascism!

I know what you’re thinking: Boy oh boy, I wish I’d taken the blue pill.

Me too.

Forward. Dread Cthulhu, I had no idea how far the rabbit hole went.

No idea at all.

Who’s this guy?

Lebron James? Famous American basketball player, one of the best in the world. What position does he play? Oh, yes, that’s right, Forward.  Good Grief, look at that guy, no wonder Conservatives are scared. Put a bag of Skittles in his hand and Lebron would be the spitting image of Lenin!

Hey, how about this socialist?

Winston Churchill a dirty Marxist? Say it ain’t so!

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”  – Walt Disney

Walt Disney, folks. Secret communist.

“The choice before the American people this year is of overwhelming importance: whether to hand the government back to the liberals or move forward with the conservative agenda.” — Ronald Reagan, 1986.

Et tu, Ronnie? Et tu?

Forewarned is forearmed.

Oh but it’s so much worse than that. So much worse. Want to know the name of the preeminent Jewish daily news site? Forward.  Yes, that’s right, the Jews own Forward.com. Can you believe it? The Jews are Nazis!

Wait, wouldn’t that make supporting Israel the same as supporting communism?

For the answer to that question and many more you didn’t know you wanted to ask, tune into Glenn Beck.

Remember to keep looking backward, folks.

For America.

 

 

Brought to you by:

 

 

 

 

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Afterword:

Couple of things:

- First, Afterword, I hope you see what I did there.

- You know, if anybody else other than the usual conservative pundits went on national media and in complete candor said this kind of bizarre stupid silly conspiracy nut nonsense, they would get locked up in the boobyhatch and pumped full of happy juice.   Glenn Beck’s mental illness is almost funny – in a sad, kicking the spaz sort of way – until you suddenly realize that it’s contagious.  Especially for people with compromised immune systems.  Education seems to be an antibody, but too many of these twits are the educational equivalent of anti-vaxxers.  Glenn Beck is the Typhoid Mary of politics.

- The part I don’t get is how Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News, and the rest of these drooling booger-eating yoyos figure that Obama is so nefarious, so clever, so tenacious, so single minded and dedicated to his cause, that he plotted from before he was born to take over the world, kill Jesus, and turn America into tasty nacho-flavored Communism, and he did it so well that he actually managed to get himself elected. But then he what? Couldn’t resist putting a Nazi slogan on his bumper stickers, because, why again?

- For a political party and an ideology composed in significant fraction by people who like to refer to themselves as “The Greatest Generation” (and really, no arrogance there. No no, you’re awesome. We totally suck. Not your fault though) and who like to go on ad nauseum about how they single handedly won World War II and the Cold War, how they personally cornholed Hitler and kicked the Soviet Union’s ass and made the world free for democracy – they sure don’t seem to understand that the terms “Nazi” and “Communist” are not interchangeable (Of course, that would require that the Greatest Generation admit that they allied with the communists to fight the fascists, funny how they leave that out of the history books nowadays, but I digress).  Honestly, I simply cannot fathom how anybody, let alone this particular group, can’t seem to get it through their pointy heads that fascism is one end of the political spectrum and communism is the other.  They may both suck, but they suck in totally different ways.  To me, nothing says your argument is invalid quicker than using “Marxist,” “Fascist,” “Communist,” and “Nazi” interchangeably.  It ought to be legal to slap the Ben Franklin Powdered Wig right off their silly heads.

- Don’t get me wrong, and don’t get too smug. Liberals have their fair share of gibbering loons too.  The extremists on both sides keep talking about taking their country back or words to that affect, I think it’s about time for Americans, reasonable intelligent moderate Americans on both sides of the aisle to step up, speak up, and start marginalizing these goofs.  The people who nominated Romney have a lot more in common with the people who nominated Obama than they do with the vocal nutjobs in their own party, extremists like Glenn Beck and his horde of drain-cleaner swilling followers.  The reverse is also true.

Wanted: Sidekick, Must Be Able To Take A Punch

So, it's come down to Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney?

After three years of listening to the screechy monkeys wailing about Obama and crying about taking "their" country back, conservatives have apparently chosen Mitt Romney as the de facto GOP candidate.

Mitt Romney.

It's just me, right?

Yeah. It’s just me. Pardon me while I guffaw in hearty, yet ironic, amusement.

Mitt Romney.

Really?

Let's review, shall we?

The first to fall was the warm up comedy act, Dominar Rygel the Sixteenth Donald Trump.

The first real actual candidate to bow out was Jon Huntsman. As I said when he declared his campaign beneath the baleful copper gaze of Lady Liberty, Huntsman never had a chance. And that is a damned shame, because Huntsman probably came closest to what most Tea Party, Libertarians, and large number of conservatives say they want. Ironically, these are the same things moderates of both parties, many Liberals, and a significant number of the Occupy movement say they want as well. But I digress. Savvy, smart, experienced, down to earth, hardworking, about as non-partisan as you can get and still be a politician, a guy who understand business, a guy who was one of the most popular governors in US history, and a solid leader who likely understands China and Asia better than anybody else in the world (certainly orders of magnitude beyond any other current politician). Huntsman is a guy who doesn't much care for either of the mainstream American political parties and he is somebody who advocates for congressional term limits, profound campaign finance reform, and a major overhaul and strict limits on Congressional redistricting. A rather large number of Americans who have been going around calling themselves We The People claim they want to take their country back from the politicians, the things Huntsman advocates would go a long, long way towards giving them exactly that.

Naturally, Huntsman was eaten by the flying monkeys first.

The Three Stooges were next. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry each appealed to their own small paranoid fringe demographic of underpants gnomes. It should give all of us pause that they made it as far as they did, obviously there is a much larger population of the untreated mentally ill running about than any of us would have guessed. None of these goofs ever had a real chance, despite the personal endorsement of the Almighty, there just aren't enough Unibombers or members of the Texas Independence Movement to make a significant voting bloc, and let's face it, Godfather's pizza sucks giant dirty donkey balls. I do admit, however, that as somebody who writes about politics and as somebody who is as easily amused as I am, I was really rooting for Cain. I would have paid actual real genuine American cash bucks to see Herman The Pizza Man debate President Obama one on one, man to man and mano a mano, constipation to Constitution, live on national TV. I might even have subscribed to HBO for that that, because, honestly, there hasn’t been a really worthwhile comedy special since Palin's interview with Katie Couric. In my mind's eye I picture Cain’s head flopping backward and a crazy little Herman face looking out of his neck like Sam Rockwell's character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy madly shouting, "Magrathea! Magrathea!" (or maybe "Cheese Pizza! Cheese Pizza!").

Cain, Dread Cthulhu, talk about a guy whose brain runs on lemons, but I digress yet again.

Seriously, Zaphod Beeblebrox had a better chance at the nomination than any of these three twits.

Much less amusing was the other glassy-eyed religious zealot in the mix, Rick Santorum. Santorum is about as funny as cervical cancer and his brand of theocracy is just about as accepting and tolerant as an Ayatollah at a Castro District Pride parade. He was supposed to appeal to the conservative base, but he couldn't even muster up enough votes to win his own home state primary.

Next out was Newt Gingrich. Of course, he's not actually out yet, but will apparently announce next week that he's officially quitting the race. Then he'll take all his toys and retreat to Moon Base Reagan and write a book about how he won a moral victory and how he’s not really sulking. We're all just supposed to ignore the fact that Gingrich has repeatedly sworn he would stay in until Tampa, no matter what, cross my heart and hope to die. Of course there's nothing surprising about Gingrich's failure to keep a promise, it's pretty much his trademark. If he can screw over a couple of wives in the process, he gets a royalty payment.

Frankly, Gingrich only lasted as long as he has because the universe doesn't prevent crazy people from being Las Vegas billionaires or starting superPACs.

Then there's Ron Paul. I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I really dislike this guy. I think he's a galloping goof and if his kid is any indication, it's probably a hereditary condition. His followers are starting to verge on the walleyed gibbering version of lost cause fanaticism (Magrathea! Magrathea!).  If they all decide to move to a jungle compound in Guyana and start eating each other I won't be even mildly surprised. But even I have to admit that Paul does seem to live up to what he preaches - that's fairly unique in a professional politician, especially this crowd, and especially one from Texas (Yes, yes, I know. Look I hate to keep busting on Texas, but seriously, you stop and I'll stop).

Ron Paul doesn't have to drop out, he was never actually in the race to begin with.

And so, after all the moaning and wailing and teeth gnashing, after three frantic piss-filled years of Hitler-tossing and horror struck dire warnings of sodomy and socialism, liberalism and death panels, communism and the end of the world and the Anti-Christ, totalitarianism, Marxism, the shambling undead corpse of Ronald Reagan, and OMFG Nazis! we're finally down to it.

And who did the Republicans pick?

Romney.

Mitt Romney.

Ha ha h… wait, what?

After three years of bitching about presidential arrogance and the red tide from China, Republicans didn’t pick the down to earth guy with the foreign policy experience.  After three years of pointing out how the current occupant of the White House never served in the military and hates veterans and the working man and America, they didn’t pick the pray for rain cowboy cargo pilot.  After loudly lamenting the death of “traditional family values” and the insidious sparkly gay agenda, they didn’t pick Ford-Tough-Super-Duty-Uterus  Lady who also happens to be an expert in degayification.  Despite complaining bitterly about a lack of business acumen in the White House, they didn’t pick the guy who more or less claims to have invented the pizza industry single handedly, while walking up hill, both ways, to work barefoot in the snow. After a decade of pissing themselves blind over Muslims and bemoaning the lack of Jesus in the classroom they didn’t pick the Uber Christian. And after three years of complaining about the president’s comparative lack of experience in Washington and the cancellation of the space program, they didn’t pick the Beltway insider Moon Man either.

No, they picked the one guy who is politically closest and ideologically most like, wait for it, waaaaaaaaiiiiiit for it, most like Barack Obama.

Buwah?

You're shitting me, right?

So, in the end, after all the rhetoric and all the anguished rending of garments and self flagellation, after repeated threats of government shutdowns, after all the talk of taking our guns to Washington, after tea parties and talk of treason and secession and civil war, after the patriots and powdered wigs, after the tear gas and the Tasers, after the ridiculous idiotic birther nonsense and the endless silly comparisons of who the better Christian was, after all that bullshit about elitism and who had lost touch with the common man, they picked the handsome moderate elitist millionaire with a private elevator in the garage of his vacation mansion and the weird religion made from magic underpants and the funny marriage customs who championed universal healthcare, gun control, big government and made his fortune by liquidating jobs and closing businesses and who said that he would do pretty much exactly what the current President has been doing to end the war and fix the economy (only he'd do it faster and without any OMFG Nazis!).

Refresh my memory, what was all the rabid frothy objection to Obama again?

What could it be? What could it be?

Hmmmm. It’s a puzzle.

What’s that you say?

Oh, yeah, that. Riiiiight. I'm sure that's not it. Never mind. Move along, nothing to see here.

So anyway now that the GOP Sausage Machine has spit out this cycle’s wiener, the only question remaining is: who's Romney going to select as a running mate?

Marco Rubio? Chris Christie? Paul Ryan?  Rubio is supposed to appeal to Latinos because apparently Mexicans can’t tell themselves from Cubans either. Paul is supposed to appeal to people who like spread sheets and poverty. Christie is supposed to appeal to people who are still in mourning over the end of The Sopranos.  All likely choices. All boring and predictable. Just like Mitt himself. 

Romney needs to shake things up, show some spontaneity for crying out loud.  Appeal to those fringe elements who bailed out of the process and hightailed it for their mountain shacks and bible bunkers when Romney’s fellow candidates fell by the wayside.

Sarah Palin?  As amusing as a rerun of Word Salad Sally would be, there’s spontaneity and there’s going rogue.  Rogue is what they call it when an enraged elephant goes completely nuts, begins trumpeting wildly and biting at its own tail, tramples everything around into pulp, and is then eventually shot dead by the surviving bloodied villagers after rampaging through a church bus filled with crippled orphans.  Nobody wants that (well, OK, almost nobody wants that).

How about Ted Nugent? He’s already on a first name basis with the Secret Service and he’d be a hoot at fundraisers.

No?

So who then?

Republicans picked the candidate most like Obama for president, doesn’t it make sense to find a guy similar to Joe Biden for Veep?

Let's see, Biden is old, white, outspoken, profane, gaff prone, a lawyer, Catholic, immodest, nonintellectual. He got out of going to Vietnam with a draft deferment … holy hell! Joe Biden is practically a Republican already! If we could get him to snort cocaine out a gay prostitute’s belly button, or maybe torture a prisoner or two, his journey to the dark side would be complete! He’d forget all about that equal rights and sissy global warming stuff.

Sure, that’s it!

Joe Biden. He could be both Obama and Romney’s running mate.

Hey, smaller government, right? It’ll foster closer ties between Left and Right. C’mon, it’ll be like one of those arranged marriages in Game of Thrones.  Sorry Joe, it’s your duty, for the good of the realm.  You marry Prince Joffrey tomorrow at noon. Buck up, Man, you’ll grow to love him. 

Think of the money we’ll save.

States will save money by having one less name to print on the ballots, it’s not much but it adds up – especially if we could reuse Biden for two or three more election cycles. No matter how it shakes out, we don’t have to change the name on the VP’s office, don’t have to hire new staff or clean out the fridge or redecorate the VP Residence.  Hey! I’ve got an idea.  Dig this, the Constitution doesn’t assign any actual duties to the VP, in fact nobody is really sure which branch of government he even belongs to. He just sort of lurks around Washington watching TV and surfing the internet and making smart Alec comments.  But, and this is my point, he gets a government paycheck.  That’s right, the Vice President of the United States gets paid to do nothing, hell, even Prince Charles has to attend shopping mall openings and polo matches and stuff.  The American VP? Nada.  I say that’s a luxury we can no longer afford to keep on the payroll.  We save money by recycling the VP, we can save even more by putting him to work. So, what can the Vice President do?  Oh the list is endless, somebody needs to wash Air Force One, walk the First Pooch, weed the Rose Garden, clean up after GSA parties.  That kind of thing. There’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents it (that’s totally true, I looked it up on the internet). 

Sure, that’s it, Joe Biden, he’d be the perfect guy for Romney’s running mate.

Ok, just think about it. That’s all I asking.

The People We Were, The People We Are

We used to know each other.

I always wondered what happened to you, where you ended up, what you became, how your life turned out.

My memory isn’t what it once was, but I still remember you, I do.

Despite the years, decades even, I’d still recognize your face in a crowd – at least I think I would.  Probably.

It’s been a long time though, hasn’t it?

We were friends, you and I.  Once, long ago.

Maybe we were inseparable or maybe we just sort of knew each other like people do, either way there was a time I would have counted you among my friends. Yes I would have and I don’t say that lightly.  I have a lot of acquaintances but by design I don’t have a lot of friends; I treasure the ones I do have.  I treasure the people who made a difference in my life, even if they exist only as memories now.

I remember you and the times we shared fondly.

I remember that I looked up to you and valued your viewpoint and opinion. I had a hard time finding myself when I was young, I wasn’t the most pleasant person or the most easygoing back then. I tend to live a bit louder than the average and I truly valued your patience with me. I respected you and you should know that you helped to shape my worldview though maybe not in a way you expected.

We were schoolmates maybe, growing up together during a childhood that is much further away now than either of us like to acknowledge.  We grew up in the same neighborhood.  Or maybe we were boy scouts together.  We met at summer camp, or on the baseball diamond, or at the lake.  Maybe we were co-workers decades ago, back before I left Michigan to see the world. Sure, we slung hash and bussed tables together, we lusted after the same hot waitresses in their cheap polyester skirts who wouldn’t give us the time of day and we hated the same jerk managers and made fun of their silly comb-overs and crappy two dollar clip-on ties.  We worked side by side on the paint line at the car factory, sharing a Marlboro Red during break to get the stink of burning metal and wet enamel out of our noses (Dumb? Sure, but back then we were positive that we were immortal. And why shouldn’t we have believed that? Nothing had killed us up to that point).   We bailed hay and drove tractors and shoveled cow manure together.  We drank cheap lousy beer from a keg around a bonfire at a party in somebody’s backyard surrounded by faceless people that I have long ago forgotten. Or maybe we met in the service. Two and a half decades in uniform, a dozen deployments, one quick month-long war and two endless decade-long ones, a half dozen ships, a dozen duty stations, six continents and seven seas, I met a lot of people. We might have been shipmates, you and I.  Maybe we stood the watch together on some Cold War cruiser off the coast of Africa or Russia or Greenland, or maybe we crossed the Pacific together and sailed through the Straits of Malacca or Indonesia or Hormuz. Maybe we went on liberty together, drinking and swearing and raising hell as only Sailors can through the streets of Mallorca and Tel Aviv and Athens and Rome and Cairo and Sidney and Hong Kong and Singapore and Nairobi and Freemantle and two dozen other places and countries that I no longer recall.  Maybe we hunted pirates off the Horn of Africa, sweating our butts off in that goddamned inhuman heat or maybe we chased drug smugglers in the Caribbean or down off the mysterious Galapagos Islands under the light of the Southern Cross.  Maybe we served together at some long gone duty station in some forgotten part of the world, trying to figure out what the hell we were doing in such a miserable godforsaken place, stuck in the festering armpit of the universe surrounded by people who hated our stinking guts or maybe just the opposite, hell and gone from the rest of civilization and so close to the edge of the world that you could see it.  Maybe we slogged through the same warzone together, wondering if we would ever make it home again, miserable and sweating and afraid and wondering what we ever did to deserve such a fate or witness such devastation.

Maybe we shed tears over the same fallen comrades, the same lost friends.

I’ve got a box of old faded photos around here somewhere, because back when I knew you cameras still used film. I’ve still got those albums, and I’ve still got those pictures. You know the ones I’m talking about. I’ve seen you piss drunk and I seen you cold sober. I’ve seen you scared and tired and hungry. I’ve seen you laugh and I’ve seen you cry.  You once told me about your dreams and what you hoped to get out of your life. I remember that you wanted to open your own restaurant, or maybe it was a bar and grill (even going so far as to draw up floor plans and menus and pick out locations), you wanted to be a singer (I heard your demo tape, the one you cut when you were 19, the one you scraped together $500 bucks to make at some fly-by-night studio with a drunk session keyboardist and a second-rate soundboard and a broken microphone. It was terrible, goddamn was it terrible, but hey, it was you and you know what? Even though you can’t sing for shit and I haven’t seen you in decades, I still have that tape and some day, if I can find a working cassette player, I’m going to upload it to your kid’s Facebook page),  you wanted to be an orthodontist (honest to God, what kind of kid dreams about being a dentist? But that was you), you wanted to be a poet, you wanted to drive a taxi, you wanted to go back home and be a small town cop.  You wanted to be a doctor, you were going to do good, save people, serve in the Peace Corps.  You were going to be a priest, you were going to walk in the footsteps of Jesus or Gandhi or Indiana Jones. You showed me pictures of your kids and your spouse and your butt-ugly three-legged dog (or maybe that was your new baby, it’s been a long time, I forget). 

We were going to change the world, you and me. Make it better. Wasn’t that what we were taught? Service above self. Respect. Duty. Honor. Be trustworthy and loyal. Integrity. Help others. Heal the sick. Clothe the poor. Feed the hungry.  Help little old ladies across the street. Leave only footsteps, take only memories.

You worked with others, of all faiths and none, maybe you believed and maybe you didn’t and maybe you just didn’t care one way or the other but you didn’t make an issue out of it.  If you talked about your faith, or lack thereof, you weren’t an ass about it, you didn’t proselytize, you didn’t try to witness me,  and you didn’t try to force your beliefs on me – because if you had, well, we wouldn’t have been friends, would we?  You didn’t hate others for believing differently, or if you did you never said so out loud and that was good enough.

You used to believe in taking care of the planet.  Remember when we were Scouts? Leave no trace, isn’t that what we practiced? You taught me that. Remember when we were kids and that commercial about keeping America beautiful, that one with Iron Eyes Cody and narrated by Robert Conrad? Remember the Exxon Valdez and Love Canal? There was a time when we, you and I, believed that we were stewards of this world and we wanted to leave it better than we found it, we wanted the next generations to know the forests and the lakes and the beauty that we knew.

In all the time I knew you, I never heard you call people who were different traitors or un-American or enemies or lazy parasites who were destroying America, I never heard you call people socialists or fascists or Nazis (Nazis for God’s sake. Nazis) just because they didn’t belong to your political party.  And the only people you called commies were communists, not the 208 members of Congress who happen to have different political beliefs than you.

We used to talk about science. Of course we grew up in the same decade when men walked upon the moon.  We believed, you and I, believed in science, in technology.  In education and learning.  We read the works of Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and we wanted to go, and hell, we even believed that we would.  Someday.

I never knew you to buy into crazy conspiracy theories and obvious nonsense and hysterical talk radio bullshit.

I don’t remember you being afraid all of the time, afraid of everybody and everything.

I don’t remember you thinking that guns and violent revolution and theocracy were good ideas.

I don’t remember you ever using a racial slur, or demeaning women or minorities. You were the guy who would have spoken up, who would have put a stop to it and, man, back then I wished that I had  half of your courage.

I don’t remember you hating people.

Hell, you used to enjoy meeting people who were different, people like me for example.  You accepted people the way they were, people like me for example, and that was so unusual in my personal experience that it profoundly changed how I viewed the world – and how I treated others.

I didn’t know there were people like you and you have no idea how much I admired you for being you.

You helped me grow up.

That’s one of the things I really, really respected about you.

Even after all these years that’s the thing I remember most about you. Your face grows hazy in my memory and maybe I really wouldn’t recognize you in a crowd after all, but I will always remember the way you treated others, people like me for example.  I’ve always carried that lesson with me and I’ve always tried to live up to your example – even if I haven’t always been as successful at it as I’d like.

 

Maybe I’m remembering it wrong. 

 

It was a long time ago and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since we last saw each other. 

But, you know, I remember plenty of folks from the same time who hated others, who were bullies and jerks and hysterical fools. I remember those who were small minded religious bigots. I remember those who thought they could solve every problem with their fists, believe me I remember those people very clearly – despite the various head trauma I’ve suffered over the years that part of my brain, the part that stores those memories, remains solidly intact. I remember those who were racists and xenophobes and haters.  I remember those who treated people who were different, me for example, with contempt and scorn and mockery.

I don’t remember you being one of them.

Maybe that’s why I was so glad to hear from you again after all these years.

You found me on Facebook or saw my Twitter feed or you came across my name listed at TogetherWeServed.  A friend of a friend of an acquaintance forwarded you something I wrote and you realized you used to know me.  You saw a link to something I wrote in the national media or on a blog or via StumbleUpon or Reddit or on Google Plus. 

You did a web search and somehow you ended up here at Stonekettle Station.

One way or the other, we reconnected after ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years.

And that’s when you found out I wasn’t the person you imagined I was.

Don’t feel bad, the discovery was mutual.

You, whoever you are, always start your message the same way. You tell me how smart you thought I was, how much you used to respect me or how funny you thought I was. What a card, what good times we had. But (and there’s always that but isn’t there? I can always see it coming. But.  I used to really respect you, but…  I used to admire you, but… I remember what a smart guy you were, but…). You read something I wrote and you were appalled.  Now to be fair, you gave me the benefit of the doubt, or benefit of your denial, whatever, and decided that I was just misguided.  You could straighten me out if you just quoted Rush or Glenn or the Savage Wiener at me.  When that didn’t work, well, then you couldn’t wait to tell me just how utterly disappointed you were in the way I turned out.

I’m not the guy you think I should be.

Sorry about that.

But hey, it turns out you’re not the person I thought you were either.

I guess that makes us even.

Nowadays you call yourself a Patriot or a True American or a Constitutionalist, implying of course that I am not, despite the fact that I’ve spent my entire adult life sworn to uphold and defend that same Constitution, that same America and despite the fact that I’ve put my life on the line to uphold that oath.

Somewhere in the intervening decades, you stopped believing in science and started believing that science is some vast conspiracy theory, a dodge, a con game to make scientists rich – the fact that you’re surrounded by rising seas and melting glaciers and dying species and the fossil record and can’t point to very many rich scientists doesn’t seem to deter you at all.  If the filthy rich guy in the the multi-million dollar temple of glass and steel and gold says it’s true, well it must be so. 

Somehow, somewhere, you gave up your dream of being a teacher and started sneering at education. Like scientists, teachers seem to deserve only your contempt and scorn. Our parents dreamed of their children having a better education than they did, you demand that your kids, and mine, have less. 

Somehow you went from accepting those that were different, like me for example, and started surrounding yourself with people just like yourself.  You’re the guy that turned the Boy Scouts from an organization that once included all, into a small withering outfit that is largely defined today by those that they hate and exclude.  Don’t. Don’t bother to try and tell me different, I’ve seen exactly what it became with my own eyes when I tried to introduce my own son to an organization I once dearly loved.  I remember a guy we once called a friend, one of the best scout leaders we ever knew, a guy that lived up to the Scout Oath and the Scout Law every single day – a guy people like you kicked out of Scouting because it turned out he was gay.  He died of cancer a while back, with his lifelong companion by his side, and all those Scouts he helped and guided and mentored over the years, well, they pretended that they didn’t even know him. So much for loyalty and courage and doing the right thing.

Somehow environmentalism became a dirty word for you.  Leave No Trace somehow became Drill, Baby, Drill.  Conservation became Consumption and anything else is just plain unpatriotic.  Our children can live without the forests and the lakes and the beauty we knew, so long as they can still buy an SUV.

Somewhere along the  line you stopped believing in bearded happy robe-wearing Jesus, that guy who welcomed all and admonished you to do onto others and love your neighbor as yourself.  Instead you took up with the Mirror Universe Messiah, the angry goatee wearing soldier Jesus who carries a high-capacity 9mm H&K concealed in his cammies and hates pretty much every goddamned body.  Feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick, love your neighbor, that hippy garbage is for suckers and socialists and people who want to enslave us all.   You’re all about America being a Christian nation run by militant Christians in accordance with Christian values, just as long as that means government can use Jesus as an excuse to dictate a woman’s reproductive and healthcare choices, but not when it comes to having a government that does what Jesus specifically commanded you to do – because charity, of course, is about individual choice. I guess it’s a whole lot easier to shoot an abortion doctor than it is to feed and care for the tens of thousands who go to bed hungry and cold and sick every night.

You used to be fearless, but somehow you ended up afraid all of the time.  Afraid of everything and everybody, afraid of change, afraid to hope, and afraid of anybody different, people like me for example.  You live in the freest nation in the world and in a time of nearly unlimited opportunity, you have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep and unfettered access to endless information, you’ve got fresh water and healthcare and a sanitary place to take a shit without it ending up in your food supply and you’ve got all the goddamned guns you can afford. Your worst damned day is better than what ninety percent of the world’s population will ever experience, ever, in their entire miserable short brutal lives.  But you’re still afraid. Maybe it’s because you only listen to people who tell you to be afraid, dimwitted small minded fearful haters who make a profit on your fear, folks like Ted Nugent and Allen West and Sarah Palin. Maybe it’s because you only listen to people like Rush and Glenn and Sean instead of actual scientists, engineers, economists, or people who have actually gone more than fifty miles from where they were born, people like me for example.

Maybe it’s because you want to be afraid. 

For all the things I once admired about you, for all the things you taught me, for all the glad memories we share, it saddens me that it should be so. 

We used to know each other.

I always wondered what happened to you.

I always wondered where you ended up, what you became, how your life turned out.

Now I know.

And I wish that I didn’t.

The War Is Over, But The Battle Rages On…

And then there were, er, uh, two?

Two actual GOP candidates I mean. 

And one of the two is Ron Paul, so technically it’s really just Mitt Romney.

Or is it?

 

Santorum’s out. For sure. Sort of. Maybe.

“We made a decision over the weekend that, while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting."

We’re not done fighting.

But, we will suspend our campaign.

Santorum is out like Newt Gingrich is out.  Like Michelle Bachmann is out.  Like Rick Perry is out.  Like Herman Cain is out. 

They’re out. But they’re not out out. They quit, but they didn’t quit quit.

They lost, but they’re still fighting. 

Kind of like their queen,

It may be tempting and more comfortable to keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand [that you] sit down and shut up, but that’s the worthless easy path. That’s a quitter’s way out

That was Sarah Palin, during her resignation speech when she quit her job as Alaska State Governor on July 3, 2009

It’s over, but we’re not done fighting?

We’re done, but we’re not done.

We quit, but we didn’t actually quit.

What the hell does that even mean?

Honestly, suspend? We suspended our campaign. It’s so totally not like quitting.  We’re not running for office any more, but we didn’t quit. No no, quitting is for quitters.  We not quitters, we suspended our campaign. We’re suspenders. 

Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and now Santorum all “suspended” their campaign.

Then they all vowed to keep fighting (just like they all vowed to go all the way to Tampa, but I digress, as is my wont).

Refresh my memory, aren’t these the same people who so utterly despise “political correctness” and who pride themselves on “saying it like it is” without sugar coating? Really aren’t these those people?

Why the hell can’t they just admit that they lost and they are now quitting?

Honestly, I think there needs to be some kind of federal law or Constitutional amendment or a Fatwa from His Humungous, the Pope, or something that compels politicians to stand in front of a camera and say this exact line, “I quit.  I am defeated. My campaign is over. I concede. I have lost.  I am a loser. I was beaten. I am no longer a candidate. I am a worm.  I am lower than whale turds on the bottom of the sea.  I have lost, lost, lost.  I will now slink home where I will sit in my darkened living room wearing nothing but a pair of dirty boxer shorts and watch reruns of SpongeBob Squarepants while moaning like a small child with a belly ache. I will drink cheap red wine straight from the box and go unwashed and cry until my wife brings me a grilled cheese sandwich with the crust trimmed off and some Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O’s with the little cut up weenies in ‘em.”

Then they should be publically marked with a large “L” drawn on their foreheads in indelible black Sharpie Marker and be forced to wear their underpants on the outside of their clothes for a year whenever they are out in public.

I guarantee that a law like that would dramatically cut down on this “suspend” bullshit. 

Yes, yes. I’m an idea man, everybody says so. Make sure they spell my name correctly on the Nobel, my middle name is “Goddamned.”

The battle is over.

But we’re going to keep fighting.

What? Like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find in a cave on some long forgotten South Pacific island fifty years after World War II ended? All wild-eyed and bearded and raggedy-assed, living on rats and drinking his own piss. Still fighting for a long defunct Emperor and a nation that had been burned to the ground and rebuilt as a country that makes fuel-efficient cars, creepy Anime porn, and music that sounds like a cat and a fire alarm in a blender? Like that? Is that how they’ll “keep fighting?”  Because I would totally pay to see Rick Santorum drink his own piss, I’m just saying.

Santorum didn’t give a reason for his non-quitting campaign suspension. 

The press seems to think it was because of his daughter, Bella, who has a rare genetic disorder and was hospitalized over the weekend. As a parent myself, I’m sure Santorum loves his daughter with all of his small calloused heart and her welfare is of the utmost importance to him and I think he’s perfectly sincere when he says so. And if he did quit because he puts the welfare of his family over his own ambition, well, you know, good on him.  But I think that ship sailed about six months ago,  his daughter didn’t just get sick, she’s been sick since the moment she was conceived and she’s always going to be sick despite all the prayers to the Great Bird of the Universe to make it otherwise – well, unless secular science and the Satan-spawned stem-cell medical research Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in finds a cure, but I digress yet again.  His daughter’s tragic illness is nothing new, and I seriously doubt that it was the reason for Santorum’s decision to suspend his campaign even if his campaign does decide to officially use her as an excuse.  I have no proof of this, of course, but I strongly suspect that like the other ego-driven jackasses who have also recently fallen off the GOP bug-wagon on the way to Crazytown, Santorum bailed out so that he could claim that he went out a winner.  I think he quit, ur sorry, suspended his campaign because the polls in Pennsylvania were looking pretty damned grim for Rick Santorum.  These are the folks who know Santorum the best, and they’re the ones who handed him a big pink slip after his second term in the Senate. It’s not his daughter, it’s his ego, he just can’t stand the thought of having to admit he lost. To Romney. In his own home state. Even Gingrich didn’t have to suffer that indignity. If Santorum can’t even win over his own neighbors, hell, his own family, on his own home turf, it’s going to be damned hard to avoid having to drink his own piss on national TV.  But if he bails out now, before Pennsylvania, he can claim that he left on his own terms, i.e. as a winner – which is a lot like running the Boston Marathon for five miles, then stopping, doing a few stretches, and claiming victory by saying, “hey, at least I didn’t end up puking on myself in the middle of the street in front of my own children. I’ve still got my dignity, man, and that makes me a winner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go give the actual winner some advice on winning…”

We will suspend our campaign.

But, we’re not done fighting!

Honestly, what the hell?

What if we actually did business that way? No really, what if we all behaved like this? As a society? What if civilization operated like some institutionalized version of Road Rage? What? You beat me to the exit?  You passed me? You cut me off? Oh no you didn’t girlfriend!  Why you dirty rotten son of a bitch! Now it is so totally on!

I know by definition we’re all supposed to be adults here, but we’re just going to go on acting like petulant children. Why not.

What if we approached civil rights like this? Sure the marches and protests and court cases are long over. We know what the right thing is.  Everybody is equal, sort of, and yeah, sure we voted for segregation and Separate But Equal and George Wallace, and sure we ended up on the wrong side of history.  But you know what? We’re just going go right on hating people based on their skin color and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation and we’ll just keep right on trying to deny them an equal share of society. Yep. The war’s over, but we’ll just keep right on fighting for something we know is wrong.

Damned straight.

Or say the environment?  Oh yes, sure, okay, turns out that you can’t just keep dumping sewage and heavy metals and industrial waste into the water supply without consequence.  Turns out that natural resources aren’t, in fact, infinite. Turns out that if you destroy enough of an environment or kill enough of something, it goes away forever and God doesn’t just wave his big juju magic God stick and make more.  Sure, ok, we’ve seen enough dead lakes and Exxon Valdezes and Love Canals and Cancer Alleys and superfund sites and Dustbowls and mid-ocean garbage patches and Great Irish Potato Famines and deep water oil well blowouts and Salton Seas and droughts and plagues and famines to know that we can’t just keep shitting in our own nest without consequences. Sure we get that, but we’re just going to keep acting like we can because despite all evidence to the contrary and a thousand years of recorded human history and thousands, hell millions, of examples to the contrary we’re going to believe that industry will regulate itself.  In our best interest.  Just because.

Drill, Baby, drill.

And not only industry, Wall Street too.  Sure, despite the catastrophic implosions of unregulated markets during the 1720 Mississippi Bubble, or the Great Panic of 1819 (and 1837, 1847, 1857, 1884, 1893, 1896, 1901, and 1907), followed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which plunged the world into the Great Depression, the recession of 1937, Silver Thursday and Black Wednesday, the Dot Com Bubble, and don’t forget the Housing Market Crash, and the recent Not-So-Great Recession, what we need here is less regulation. Sure.  Because banks and business can regulate themselves and what’s good for them is good for us. We need to get out of the way of the job creators, like Lehman Brothers and Enron and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and, well, we’ll keep fighting for those corporate citizens, because they’re people too you know.

And you know what else those citizens need?  More tax breaks. Sure thirty years it’s been now and so far trickle-down economics has mostly trickled from the billionaires to the millionaires, but sooner or later, yeah baby, it’ll trickle right on down to us peons. You just wait. Any minute now Reagonomics is going to pay off big time. Any minute now. And sure, those rich bastards have been basking in the Bush era tax cuts for a decade now, and so far instead of creating jobs they sent about six million of them overseas or liquidated them all together, but man, you know what they need? More tax breaks. Then they’ll create some jobs. You’ll see.  Hey, only in a great country like America would unemployed folks whose jobs were sent to India be out in the street wearing Tri-Corner hats and demanding tax breaks for Millionaires.

Seriously, is this a great club or what?

Hey, here’s some good news, we got the Israelis and the Palestinians to sign another peace treaty! Because, this time, this time, man, Hamas won’t suddenly start lobbing rockets into Jewish towns and Hezbollah won’t decide to detonate a car bomb in downtown Tel Aviv or a bunch of Orthodox Jewish extremists won’t suddenly decide they just have to build a new settlement right smack in the middle of some Arab’s olive orchard.  This peace treaty is signed but we’re just going to go right on doing the same stupid shit and killing the same people and hating each other. Because that worked out so well up to now.

And speaking of bombing the Third World into democracy, sure we damned near bankrupted ourselves by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know what would pay that right off, invade Iran! Peace through more war.  Of course, sadly, the war is over.  We didn’t win, but, heck, we’re not gonna lose either.  Now, we could have peace and get on with the business of rebuilding the country.  Sure, we could do that … or, we could just keep blowing shit up anyway. Maybe strap on some C4 and go light that sucker up in the middle of the market place. Keep shootin’ people randomly.  You know, like that.  We quit, but we didn’t quit quit if you know what I’m sayin’. And a hundred years from now the Iraqi equivalent of Rednecks will still be driving around Bagdad with Saddam Hussein’s flag plastered across the back window of their pickup trucks and explaining to everybody that will listen how denying Shi’ites equal rights isn’t really, actually, bigotry, it’s just a symbol of our history, man. 

Oh, yes, let us have some more of that.

 

You know, on second thought, it’s probably a good thing we don’t run civilization like these silly self involved bastards run campaigns, eh?

What?

Oh.

Right.

Damnit.

And then, this afternoon Newt Gingrich said despite suspending his campaign and bouncing checks to the state of Utah and having basically conceded, he was going to continue the fight. He said,

I want to keep campaigning!

Man, I really hope this doesn’t mean we’re all going to have to start drinking our own piss.

I’m just saying is all.