Mitt Romney « Scene: Enough

On a nearby but surprisingly removed planet the presidential candidate Mitt Romney was poised last night on the cusp of a major victory, the intellectual titans of his home planet predicting the looming triumph: Karl Rove, George Will, Dick Morris, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Kudlow, Michael Barone, Glenn Beck all assuring us of a Romney demolition of the electoral map. In the hearts and minds of every true believing, Fox watching, Ayn Rand inhaling, evolution and climate science denying homophobic Tea Party stalwart of the Wonder Bread demographic this prediction had to be true. And yet, many a heart was broken. Oh, the humanity.

Republicans have proved beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt they possess the capability to construct a cosmos distinct from our own, an alternate universe with its own novel laws of physics, its distinctly fictional history books and innovative rules of inquiry, and to fully populate it with willing and even eager inhabitants. What could go wrong?

One is tempted to say last night’s rude awakening couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people, given the cascade of racial slurs and coded race-baiting spewing from the president’s opposition for years, given the insults and smears and manifest disrespect of this honorable and optimistic president by a vitriolic Republican rank and file, right-wing media machine and coven of despicable Romney surrogates, suspicion cast even on the president’s American origins, almost no denigration considered beyond the pale. Yet, despite Republicans’ boasts that they are the real America, an examination of the demographics of last night’s election results confirm that which was so clearly revealed in the previous presidential election, and that is: there is indeed a real America …and it ain’t them.

I have more faith than many do that the Republican Party for the foreseeable future will retain its same crazily dogmatic and putrefying demeanor, believing it fully incapable of controlling its own roiling instincts and surging resentments and its need to express them, whether it be the ridiculously foolish and utterly mistaken stereotypes of the undocumented immigrant or the tired, racially-tainted and manifestly stupid caricatures of the nation’s poor.

It’s already started, Bill O’Reilly last night laying out the meme drifting across the conservative universe today, saying, “The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff, they want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” Note how closely this tracks to candidate Mitt Romney’s candid estimation of much of the nation: “… there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” These are Republicans’ actual core beliefs, and I wouldn’t go expecting them to recant them anytime soon.

Yes, they’re entitled to inhabit their small and hermetic fungal paradise, but as last night’s election makes emphatically clear, the rest of us are briskly moving on.

If, after nearly a year of Republican politics, from their Stars of the Mental Ward primaries to Mitt Romney’s Nixon redux cavalcade of relentless dishonesty you feel as though you have been washed over by a bacterium-rich soup of slime, then I share your feelings. If it won’t be ending after Election Day at least the tide will ebb, especially if President Obama defenestrates the grubby, integrity-free aristocrat Mitt Romney. The House of Representatives’ enduring Republican majority will guarantee its shelves are completely stocked with crazy.

Perhaps never before, at least in modern times has America’s abscessed one-percent and primitive ideologues, with their economic feudalism and cultural totalitarianism displayed such open contempt for America’s ordinary citizens and for the democratic ideal itself. The Romney campaign’s stated derision of facts and its prevarication about its opposition and about itself, lying with an arrogance and an aura of unaccountability approaching joie de vivre, surely is historic for its stabbing of fingers directly into eyes of the voter, objective arbiters of reality and truth itself.

Shady and weasely plutocrats like the Koch Brothers hunkering in the shadows throwing wads of money into the political process while hiding behind their rocks typifies the right-wing’s descent into the politics of creepy. Other decrepit bags of dirty money toting the same primordial political views have done the same. Republicans, who have long relied upon the “southern strategy” (translation: appeals to overt and latent racism in pockets of the electorate) outdid themselves again, stupidly accusing the president of Kenyan birth, throwing at him manifestly un-clever racist smears like “food stamp president” and depraved racist falsehoods about the Obama administration’s actions with regard to welfare…a truly seamy performance.

Perhaps most un-American of Republicans’ swan dives into the gutter is the concerted campaign of voter suppression all across the country, legalistic scheming designed to prevent Americans from casting their vote or their vote from counting. This exercise in de-facto authoritarianism begs to be addressed by a federalizing of all election laws that safeguards every American’s access to the voting booth, no matter what sort of morally defective charlatans take up residence in a state legislature or governor’s mansion. Indeed, these Republicans are cowards, who cower in the face of a fully enfranchised and fully participatory electorate the way snails recoil at a box of Morton’s.

Of course to this morally blinkered and benighted bunch little is sacred, including Americans’ most basic American right, all being fair in love, war, politics and business (given all this, one might deduce these are all-around unscrupulous people) despite their cynically theatrical “love of country” and monstrous hypocrisy about American values. In fact, they seem to regard America now the way European colonialists regarded conquered territory, a land rich in resources ripe to be exploited and a population of primitive savages easily quelled.

And there’s no better way than casting a vote to tell them: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Scene: Enough

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