The Election Crashers

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)



“Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink. And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.” - Rick Perry, Fed Up

Many of us haven't even bought our obligatory Halloween candy, yet, and the 2012 GOP presidential field is already beginning to look like something that only Pirandello could have imagined. It's a Theater of the Absurd extravaganza that we can call Eight Characters in Search of an Offer. And the scariest part of all this Republican playacting is that one of them, by virtue of some half-hearted default that'd catapulted John McCain's pasty ass to the top of the heap in '08, has to win the Republican nomination.

But to employ a more contemporary and accessible context, the Republican wannabes are more like the political version of the Wedding Crashers. Wedding crashers typically are the most genteel moochers outside of Wall Street, looking not for potential marriage partners but free food, champagne and maybe some pussy on the side. The forced and overbearing ambiance of romance is lost on them. They're just there to eat cake and have it, too.

The Republicans in this Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World race, Willard, Herman and the rest, have proven to be so inept, clueless and just plain ludicrous as they pander to one extreme element or the other that one must conclude that if Obama gets re-elected by others outside of his own cultish base it'll also be victory by default. The disaffection with the Republican alternative that had gotten him elected President of the United States will get him re-elected.

And if he does, it'll be without the support of what is plainly a diluted Democratic Congress. In the last three or four Congresses, every noteworthy liberal Democrat on the Hill has been muzzled either by getting voted out (Max Cleland, Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold), death (Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy), resigning for greener pastures and later disgrace (John Edwards) or inexplicable silence (Barbara Boxer and John Conyers).

Herman Cain, a lunatic that only another pathetic lunatic from Smegma, Tennessee choking back his own bile-engorged racism could possibly find appealing, is certainly the strangest bird in the coop. Cain is a man who, thus far, has won just a Florida straw poll, derived his 9-9-9 tax plan from Sim City and the strangest campaign ads since Mike Gravel (including one featuring Fox B actor Nick Searcy who also thought it was a good idea to get people to vote for Cain by playing himself, a snotty, temperamental B actor who's incapable of remembering a two-word line such as "Get real.").

Cain has another ad that's out in which Cain Chief of Staff Mark Block calmly tells us why Herman Cain is the best alternative to Willard Romney then sucks on a cigarette as if in post-coital bliss, thereby making everyone forget about Cain and his alleged message.

Cain is leading every Republican contender by four points, garnering 25% support throughout Crazy Base World. One keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, which will be the day that Cain says to his staff, "OK, you all realize this is a joke campaign to fill my lonely hours, right? I mean, c'mon, I'm just Herman Cain, bitches! I ran a pizza company, for Christ's sake!"

The other Republicans are hardly any more appetizing, with real heartfelt appeal grudgingly given to bottom tier candidates Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman not for a strong message or real solutions but a conspicuous lack of shithouse rat-on-fire insanity (They could each adopt as a campaign slogan, "The Unbearable Lightness of Bugshit Craziness"). On the other end of the spectrum was last month's flavor of the day Rick "Gov. Goodhair" Perry, who wasted no time whatsoever immolating his campaign barely 24 hours after announcing his candidacy by suggesting we should execute Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Then there's the pesky issues of owning stock in a porno distributor, literally praying for rain to no effect and his questionable taste in hunting lodges.

Michele Bachmann, Jim Jones in drag and desperately looking for a cult, is saddled with a closeted husband whose antigay clinic received $137,000 in Medicaid dollars to Pray teh Gay Away and is willing to give women their choice regarding light bulbs but not their uteri. And don't even get me started on Rick "Please Stop Googling Me" Santorum and Mitt Romney, the world's scariest and most dangerous game show host and the only man alive who by conspicuous relief can give polymer organic appeal.

Until a couple of months ago, it was impossible to imagine that Sarah Palin could upstage at least half of these contenders in terms of erudition, articulateness, polish and a grasp of the issues but here we are.

Into this autocoprophagic melee steps Barack Obama, a man with identical approval and disapproval ratings according to the new NY Times-CBS poll (46 each, although the latest Rasmussen results shows only 19% polled "strongly approve" of the job the President is doing, with just a 43% total approval rating.).

If Barack Obama pulls off his re-election bid, he'll be the only President elected to two terms based on little else but fear of the opposition rather than actual achievement. Even though the nation is erupting in anti-government and anti-corruption outrage at its employers Wall Street, Obama has done nothing but give brief lip service to #OccupyWallStreet in spite of the fact that it's no longer a national phenomenon but a global one and unforgivably insulted the #OWS protesters by saying they were no different than the Tea Baggers.

Obama simply doesn't get it since his own tepid jobs plan (which would've emulated what's being done in Georgia, i.e. making poor unemployed work for corporations for free) got shot down faster than John McCain over Hanoi by the minority Senate Republicans who, amazingly, have even fewer ideas than the White House regarding job creation save for "Cut taxes!"

It would be a crying shame if we gave ourselves another four more years of this because we wanted to stretch out for another 48 months what is virtually inevitable: The Republican wet dream of hurling us back to the 19th century.