Sandy Hook

Sandy Hook

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Election 2010: A Little Puzzled


Surprised? No.
Disappointed? Yes.
Puzzled? Absolutely.

About two decades ago Lisa the Loon hired a big shot, smooth talking stock broker to manage all her assets. She lived high on the hog until she discovered that her broker had mismanaged all her investments. Overnight her portfolio dwindled to minus zero. Undaunted, she fired the hot shot and hired a sharp young man to help rebuild her depleted assets. But two years later she fired the bright young man because he hadn’t brought about enough change fast enough. So, what did Lisa the Loon do? She rehired the big shot, smooth talking stock broker who brought her to ruin in the first place.

Isn't this just what happened in this election? Puzzling, isn't it?

Another piece of the puzzle is made up of a couple of semi-diverse groups with mutual, at least temporarily, goals - one with tea bags dancing around their heads and another with dreams of gold lining, not your streets, but their pockets. These good patriots and Chritianists mouth empty platitudes about honor and family values at every opportunity.

What’s so puzzling about this piece of the puzzle is that these good honorable patriotic Christianists supported and voted for candidates who are anything but.

David Vitter, Republican Senator of Louisiana: Back in 2007, news broke that this pious family man had been palling around with New Orleans call girls for quite some time. Of course this good upstanding father of three denied it, which makes him more than just a lying down kind of sinner. Unfortunately for him his name popped up in the notorious DC Madam’s little black book in July of that year. And then one of the ladies of the evening kissed and told all: Dapper Dave really liked to play Diaper Dave. So what did the party of honor and family values do? Nothing except to return him to office.

Nathan Deal, former Georgia congressman and governor-elect. This gay bashing wheeler-dealer is under all kinds of ethics investigations. Earlier this year the Office of Congressional Ethics released a report alleging that Deal was guilty of violating House rules by improperly using his office to push policy that would benefit his family's auto salvage company. But this slippery Son of God resigned from Congress to avoid the disciplinary arm of the House ethics committee.

Rand Paul, senator-elect of Kentucky. Questionable stand on Civil Rights. Questionable non-apology for the head-stomping incident at a debate with his opponent. Questionable board certification. The reason I use “questionable” is because his garbled English is so “questionable” that it’s impossible to ascertain what he really means. But now he’s off to Washington to join the establishment he hates so much in order to bring it to its knees.

One other thing that puzzles me about the right, and which is just as hypocritical as all the rest, is its disdain for what they perceive to be big government. They enjoy the benefits of clean air, safe food and cars, free public education, roads and sidewalks, government subsidized public transportation, safe working conditions, federally protected bank deposits, and city, state and national parks – to name just a few. If they lose their jobs, they get unemployment. If they get injured on the job, they get disability. I guess when they yammer “I want my country back” they mean they are willing to fore-go all of these big government benefits. More about this kind of twisted logic can be found at DemWit.

But now that the GOP has finished using the Tea Party for their own interests, mainly to win the 2010 mid-term elections, they are already beginning to distance themselves from the insanity that is the extreme right. After supporting certifiable nuts like Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle and watching them bite the dust, maybe the Republican establishment of Boehner and McConnell has no more use for these renegades.

As Robert Ruiz writes, “The folk of the nation have spoken---inarticulately, incoherently and far from lucidly but they have spoken.” Yes they have and I refuse to lower myself to the depths of ugly unpatriotic stupidity that the right exhibited, and still does, after the election of our current president.

Besides, there are some good signs that have come out of this election. Despite the obscene amounts of money that some candidates spent on their own elections the majority of voters were unimpressed. Despite the millions of dollars that the Koch Brothers, the Coors Family, Dick Armey, and Fox News and Rupert Murdoch spent, the majority of Americans weren’t willing to prostitute themselves.

And I derived more than a little perverse pleasure when some of the polls misfired. Angle was predicted to beat Reid by three percentage points; Reid beat her by 5.6 percentage points. Bennet of Colorado has won the senate seat and Quinn seems to be squeaking by in Illinois, but this one is still too close to call. Brady was expected to win by 4.7 percentage points.

For the most part I have no use for Independents and would be delighted if their switch-hitting ways give them saddle sores that grow and fester for years to come.

I hope Democratic politicians cultivate a stiff spine because they’re going to need it over the next two years as the Republicans once again divert attention from the serious problems at hand with needless investigations and attempts to shut down the government, a la Newt Gingrich. As Infidel753 says, by the 2012 elections, “the voters will have gotten pretty tired of them.”

I think I’m already there. The thought of having to listen to Orange Man Boehner emote for two years is enough to make a strong woman cry.

PS: The Republicans do not have a mandate.

24 comments:

  1. TnLib...

    Its real simple, old white people are angry at the black guy in the White House and they voted in droves. Young people, gay people, Latinos, and blacks didn't go to vote...

    The 50+ year old, high school educated white guy is the most likely, next to a black man, to be unemployed and most likely permenantly. The average age of a Fox News listener is 60 years old and guess what? Its a white guy!

    So, they voted in droves.....

    They think Sarah Palin is HOT! Oh, and they believe that the democrats are the party for minorities who are always getting a free ride...

    So THEY WANT THEIR COUNTRY BACK!!!!

    Politics 101....they voted for McCain in droves but now due to unemployment and fear there are a lot more of them...

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  2. In defense of us white guys that are pushing 50, who among us hasn't thought of Sarah Palin and a diaper?

    Vitter lived the fantasy. Who am I to insult his diaper fetish?

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  3. surprised, puzzled, disappointed....Yes to all, but in 2 years the fickle voters will have had their fill of the thugs, especially since it will be quite obvious they can't govern when they have their heads up their asses...

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  4. TAO: I guess I don't understand why older citizens would vote for a party that's doing everything they can to destroy it. The job thingy is a serious problem but I don't see the GOP coming up with any viable options to stimulate the economy.

    Truth: Spoken like a true Christian. ; )

    Sue: Maybe but we have to start planning and get to work.

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  5. Well written righteous post, tnlib! Would have loved to sit at your kitchen table and cry in my beer last night.

    The guy in the WH has a loving wife and an all-American family--everything the Christianists admire, and whom did they return to office in Looosiana? A frequenter of prostitutes!

    Go figure. The conservatives construct this narrative of what is a REAL 'merkin, and then abandon it when one of their own violates its rules. They're more loyal to ideology than to values.

    Hence their admiration for a whoremonger, who is one of them, over a real family man, Mr. Obama, who most definitely is NOT.

    This dissonance can be applied to those who mistrust leaders withd "larnin" and intellectual heft. Any one of the TPs would be thrilled if a Harvard or a Princeton or a Yale were to offer their children or grandchildren a scholarship and brag about the fact that their offspring went to those prestigious institutions, yet at the same time they're suspicious of any Democratic leader who has earned a diploma from one of those schools and labels those who have "elitist." Hence their embracing a Sarah Palin and their disdain for "elitists" Barack and Michelle.

    I don't understand this country anymore.

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  6. They want transparency and fairness from everyone but themselves. Hypocrites -- every last one of them.

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  7. Shaw: I don't understand our country anymore either. Just seems people are getting meaner and more selfish by the day.

    Kay: I actually almost called this "The Hypocrisy of it ALL."

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  8. You cite, "As Robert Ruiz writes, “The folk of the nation have spoken---inarticulately, incoherently and far from lucidly but they have spoken.”," (not sure how to do that cite correctly). My impression, without researching the question, is that this is how the "folk of the nation" always speak in elections. Its not new and it will happen again.

    At several points you express surprise that people vote against what seem to be their own best interests, and they do. For you that may seem foolish, for some it may seem that we or they don't understand their best interests, to some it may indicate that personal "best interests" aren't seen as the highest value people feel moved to serve. Whichever might be true, it doesn't take much looking around to find people acting against what appear their best interests every day, not just in elections.

    The human critter is damned complicated. Elections create the setting in which that can be seen all across the country on one single day.

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  9. The reason the results were so different from those of 2008 is that it wasn't the same electorate. Check out the figures at Politics Plus here. 38.2% of eligible voters voted this time, compared with 62.2% in 2008 -- less than two-thirds as many.

    Younger people voted strongly Democratic, but not enough of them turned out.

    GOTV is critical.

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  10. Steve: I can't argue with you there - darn it. It's the hypocrisy, especially amongst the religious right and the family values types, that I find so maddening. And they're so damn self-righteous about it while supporting the types of people whose behavior is what they are supposedly against. I think this goes beyond just voting against their self-interests. But the latter certainly brings up the issue of the uninformed voter who doesn't seem to have the ability to reason.

    Infidel: Absolutely and I think this is par for the course for a mid-term election, don't you? I haven't really studied all the Republican wins but it seems to me that most, not all, were really pretty close. In other words, there's no mandate as the Orange Man claims.

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  11. I guess Lisa the Loon prefers a good fucking over a slow but sure approach.

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  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  13. Oops, a slip of the keyboard! Meant to say that I look forward to seeing how Boehner goes about "never letting down" the new tea party representatives. May become addicted to C-SPAN over the next two years!

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  14. JC, Superstar: Tsch, tsch but you're right.

    Nance: There's nothing Beohener likes more than to see himself on the TV monitor. If you think about it, every time the cameras span the House, he makes sure he positions himself so he can look right in the eye and he uses his own bedroom eyes to his advantage. He's so pathetically transparent.

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  15. ‘Tis a puzzlement, isn’t it? And, I guess we could talk it to death. As you noted in one of your quotes at the top of your blog: these bad politicians were elected by those who didn’t vote.

    One thing that came out of this election cycle is the need for REAL campaign finance reform. The media aren’t going to back that, because they’re the ones who get the money. And one of its staunchest supporters, Feingold, was voted out.

    Funny thing, though, as Infidel points out: all that money didn’t bring out the voters.

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  16. BJ: We for sure need campaign reform but we'll never get it with the Party of the Rich in control of the House. In fact, I don't think we can expect much of anything during the next two years except gridlock.

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  17. I was just watching Lewis Black on Olbermann. He said everytime he puts on political news on TV he has to tell himself he stopped doing illegal drugs years ago, because what he's seeing is real and not an illusion.

    You know, I'm glad I'm not the only one who experienced that. Thanks Lewis!

    Forgive me.....I was going to say something else, but the thoughts vaporized into the ozone. Who wants ice cream?

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  18. Good post and I share your views, as you know. I am getting tired of preaching to the choir but know I will continue in the hopes that I get through to one of those righteous tea party types. Maybe when pigs fly.

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  19. George Carlin NEVER VOTED
    good comedian, bad citizen

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  20. True to his character, Frodo likes to wait until all that needs to be said lies before him. In this instance, he notes the wisdom of the infidel, who documented that which is most significant. "Off-year elections," are what they are, and they are not comparable to Presidential erections (not a typo). Few there were who went to the polls merely to support the young President. There is a continutity to those who show up in an "off-year" to vote against "the regime" rather than to support Nathan "Raw" Deal (whom Frodo has earmarked to be the first electee indicted from the current class).
    Lose not your hearts brave warriors. The Ring is yet not destroyed, and it will take all of us to climb Mount Doom, this time.

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  21. Frodo: It will be a tough climb I'm afraid. But anything can happen and it often does.

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