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Can It Get Worse?

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Yesterday’s Villains Can’t Hold a Candle to Today’s

Yesterday’s Villains Can’t Hold a Candle to Today’s

My first presidential election was in November 1968. Not coincidentally, that was the election that put Richard M. Nixon into his first term in the White House. Did I vote for Nixon? No, my ballot went to the Rev. Otto Schlumpf for President (write-in) and Dick Gregory for Vice President. Now, I can’t even find Schlumpf on the Internet, let alone Wikipedia. On the plus side, I now begin to appreciate some of Nixon’s accomplishments in office.

My political life has been bedeviled with Republicans from the very start. Could things get any worse? The answer is (as usual), yes! After I told all my friends that I would move to Canada is Ronald Reagan got elected President, he got in and stayed for two terms. What do I think of Reagan now? He has improved somewhat in my books; though I still think he was a very flawed President.

Could things get any worse? Yes, indeedy, after eight years of Clinton, we got the worst of them all—at least so far—George W. Bush. At the moment, I still can’t think of anything good to say about this man. Will I ever? I doubt it.

Could things get any worse? I’m afraid so. In 2016, we elect another President, and I have no idea at the present moment wither America’s vast psychoses will lead us. Will it be some Tea Party hack like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Or will we get another Obama-like respite until the next lunatic leader? (It seems that the lunatics get worse every ten or twenty years.)

The American voter is certainly no smarter than he or she was in 2000, 1980, 1960, or just about whenever. What troubles me most is that television has not only led to the dumbing-down of the American voter, but it has made all of us more susceptible to distorted electioneering tactics employed by big corporations and their political hirelings.

What is the likelihood that American voters will view attempts to influence their vote via TV with increasing skepticism? Not too good, I’m afraid.

Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

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Endless Election Canvassing

Endless Election Canvassing

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but Southern California seems to have gone into an endless election mode. Every day, I have to yell over the phone at political volunteers and people conducting so-called “surveys,” and I have to throw out almost half a pound of elaborate four-color mailers such as the one above.

Don’t get me wrong: I fully intend to vote. It is just that I consider myself impervious to advertisements, robocalls, and even person-to-person calls.

As the election approaches, I will check the recommendations of the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Weekly, and the websites of several organizations whose endorsements I trust (I will not name them). It’s rather amusing that candidates for political office spend millions of dollars using the most obnoxious means to get my attention; and when I plan my voting, I check only sources that cost the candidate nothing. By so doing, in my own way, I nullify the effect of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United ruling: Corporations and multimillionaires just can’t get me to listen to them.

On the morning of March 5, I will go to Stoner Playground in West L.A. to cast my vote, knowing that I have done my citizen’s duty.

One unfortunate aspect of all this is that I may stop answering my phone for the next week or so. There are two or three political calls for every social call. I’m getting very tired of slamming the phone down on these unwanted solicitations.

 

Eating Crow

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Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell Worse Later.

Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell and Taste Worse Later.

The New Yorker does it again in this hilarious cartoon by Peter de Séve in the November 26, 2012 issue.

Instead, what does the GOP do? They discount the results of the November 6 election and pretend they won it in a landslide. They not only lost it, but they are just-this-close to losing their reason for existence altogether.

The Tea Partiers will die off (remember they don’t like ObamaCare); the Libertarians will never amount to anything but a small, noisy minority; and the remaining wing nuts will gravitate elsewhere when the circus train rides out of town.

 

Unregenerate

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Speaker of the House Boehner

Speaker of the House Boehner

Excuse me, but didn’t the Republicans just lose a major election because they were as out of touch with their people as Louis XVI, the Tsar Nicholas II, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak ever were? Doesn’t that imply a period of self-examination, of wondering what they could have done wrong?

But no! The Republican house leadership is pretending they won the election. Speaker of the House John Boehner is pretending that Americans want billionaires and millionaires to pay less taxes because—by golly, by gosh!—most Americans want to be millionaires and billionaires. And where should the money come from that fuels the government? Just take it away from the poor and the Middle Class! Oh, you know, those 47-percenters who are such a drag on the rest of us.

I would urge President Obama to take Boehner out to the woodshed and liberally apply a two-by-four to his orange face. Nothing else seems to be getting through to him.

Look, if the Republican Party has a massive suicidal urge, that’s all fine and good. But don’t let them be like those inarticulate bastards who take an arsenal to their workplace and blow everyone in sight away before pointing a gun to their own empty heads. I think it’s time for an intervention.

The Biggest Losers

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Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands Corporation

Millions of dollars were all but thrown away by many of America’s most wealthy right-wingers. Heading up the list is Sheldon Adelson of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Out of $53 million he injected into the 2012 election, his only winner was a minor Michigan ballot initiative. If his political investments were race horses, they were mostly glue factory material.

Remember Karl Rove, whom George W. Bush nicknamed “Turd Blossom”? He came a cropper with his American Crossroads Super PAC, which spent $103 million in attack ads with a paltry 1% success rate. And here we thought the man was invincible, instead of being just another reputation on the rocks.

It is possible that the Citizens United decision which opened the political contribution floodgates did more of a disservice to American millionaires than it did to the electoral process. You may recall from several of my recent posts that I thought all this political advertising would ultimately be regarded as mere noise in the system which voters would just tune out. That is a typical American failing: If something works once, say the Willy Horton ads that sank Michael Dukakis’s campaign for President in 1988, that doesn’t mean that a thousand-fold increase in negative advertising will bear a thousand times as much in the way of results.

No, there are limits. You know that I don’t listen to political advertising at all. I even throw out all the political bulk mail I get without reading it. For me, information is not something I am force-fed, but something I go out and actively seek, carefully judging the accuracy of the source.

So now there are quite a few millionaires out a lot of money. I’m sure they’re on the horn with their accountants right now trying to figure out how to expense their contributions so that they won’t have to pay so much in taxes. I frankly hope they get audited and convicted. The jerks!

Papa Bear Gets It Right

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“Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly

The nickname is from Stephen Colbert, who has occasionally had him on as a guest on his Comedy Central show. In all the media and political verbiage being flung back and forth yesterday, he made probably the most accurate statement of why Obama won last night: “It’s not a traditional America any more…. The White Establishment is now a minority.”

While O’Reilly meant that in the most rueful way possible, it’s what I have been saying for years. The whole Conservative political movement in the United States has been driven by aging Whites, many of whom feel disenfranchised and alienated. They tend to be either rich (a small minority of them), or small businessmen who made it big at one time and are now facing an attrition of their past gains, or poor and wanting to identify with the rich. In any case, they are not young. If they have any children, there’s no guarantee that their children are either numerous or politically in step with their parents.

Even though I am White, I am part of that new America that O’Reilly decries. I am not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP); nor am I Scotch-Irish; nor am I a member of any other demographic cohort that runs with the Right Wing. I am a White Hungarian Renegade Catholic (WHRC) with Black, Latino, and Asian sympathies.

When I used to work with census data at Urban Decision Systems some twenty years ago, I saw the handwriting on the wall for the White political establishment.

The Handwriting on the Wall

Over the next decade or so, most of the Tea Party recidivists will either die out or enter nursing homes. Those who remain will be increasingly irrelevant in the face of a demographic groundswell for those who had, until lately, been lumped together as “minorities.” In Los Angeles, it is the Whites who are in the minority. And, really, it’s not so bad as all that.

It has always been the fate of political establishments to be supplanted. Remember the Irish immigration of the 1830s and 1840s? Then it was the “Yellow Peril” when people feared being replaced by Chinese coolies who were brought in to work on the railroads. Then it was the turn of us Eastern Europeans later in the 19th and early 20th centuries as they arrived to escape political and religious persecution. Then it was the turn of the Mexicans.

Somehow, enough always remains of America to be worthwhile, even if there is a slightly darker shade of skin, an epicanthic fold about the eyes, or broken English. Hell, I didn’t even know the English language existed until I showed up in kindergarten. (That was just before the days of a TV set in every home.)

So yesterday I called it right. I thought Obama would win. And I think we all will win in the long run as a result. Don’t worry about me becoming an embittered Conservative complaining about the relentless tides of change. That’s what life is all about.

 

 

This Is the Day

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This Says It All About U.S. Elections

I was surprised, but at the same time gratified, to see about 150 people in line ahead of me when I showed up at 7:15 am—just a quarter of an hour after the polls opened—to cast my ballot. Needless to say, I voted against Mitt Romney and whatever issues and candidates the Koch Brothers and their nefarious ilk supported.

For me, the 2012 Election is over. I’ll check the Internet a few times this evening to see how things are going, looking anxiously over my shoulder to make sure there is no last-minute groundswell of support for Conservative candidates.

Tomorrow morning, I will know whether we will be relatively safe for the next four years under the mercurial “Bronco Bama” or whether I will have to join the disloyal opposition and bullyrag my Senators and Congressman into doing to the Romnesiac what Boehner and McConnell have been doing to Obama since he took office. And I’ll want to see birth certificates and baptismal certificates for Romney and his wife and dog: We don’t want no polygamite Messicans taking over our fair land.

You can probably guess that, if Romney should win, you will see me doing more blog entries in protest of what I can guess will be some pretty objectionable government policies. And I will certainly foment class warfare against Right Wing billionaires.

Frankly, I would just as soon write about some great literature I’ve read, neat places Martine and I have visited, and maybe some personal reminiscences of my past. If you haven’t voted yet, you can save me from becoming politically radicalized by voting Democratic wherever possible. You don’t want to do that, don’t you?

The above Cartoon is a classic from the New Yorker.

 

I Wipe the Dust of Ohio from My Feet

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I Get Pretty Tired of All My Political Contributions Being Spent in Ohio

Unless you live in one of the swing states, such as Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, you’re vote just doesn’t count as much. Now California is the most populous State in the Union. All fifty-five of our electoral college votes for President will go to Obama. That’s almost a dead certain guarantee, however badly the ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley and the Republican troglodytes of Orange County feel about it.

But where is all the effort in the last few weeks of political campaigning going? You guessed it: Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and a handful of other swing states.

Why is it that these are swing states? The answer is simple: Because they are divided approximately fifty-fifty between Democrats and Republicans. Take Ohio. I’m from Cleveland originally, which, like most of Northeastern Ohio, leans to the Democrats. South of Lake Erie is where most of the trogs, recidivists, and Red-State racists live. As a Clevelander, I never visited Columbus, Dayton, or Cincinnati: We also considered the southern half of the State to be south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Over the decades since I’ve left Ohio, the State has drifted farther and farther to the right. So far, in fact, that I repudiate my origins, at least insofar as the State is concerned. (I still have some feelings for Cleveland, “The Mistake on the Lake.”)

It’s not that I want to see more political advertising in California. I hate political advertising. It’s one of the reasons I don’t watch television at all. But I have donated several hundred dollars to the Obama campaign; and I am mightily pissed that most of that money is probably going to television stations in parts of Ohio that I would just as soon see swamped by a tsunami.

There is a funny short piece on Raw.Com entitled F*ck You Ohio for hogging presidential race. Among the points it brings up is that all kinds of concessions must be made to Southern Ohio regarding the use of coal for energy:

For example, [Andy] Cobb [of Second City] notes that vying for Ohio means that candidates feel the need to promote “clean coal” technologies, “something the rest of the country knows is bullshit.”

“Ohio made them do that,” he observes. “Clean coal doesn’t exist. Coal is dirt. So, clean coal is like clean dog shit.”

Why should we kowtow to Ohio for being so deeply divided? The answer lies in our country’s dysfunctional electoral college voting system, which should be scrapped in favor of direct elections. But that is another matter entirely. It is probably the most glaring weak point of our Constitution and should be scrapped.

I suspect, however, that it will drag on for several more decades, doing incalculable harm to our political process.

Addendum (10/26/12): This cartoon from David Horsey that appeared in today’s Los Angeles Times:

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Going to the Mattresses

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Is There Any Escape?

We have reached that part of the election when all the millions of dollars spent by candidates and Political Action Committees (PACs) lead to a barrage of ads on television and over the telephone. During the last four weeks of a hard-fought political campaign (and they’re all that way now), I screen all my telephone calls.

Irrespective of the candidate or issue, I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone about politics; and I most certainly don’t want to participate in opinion polls. I already avoid television—unless I am watching a movie without advertising or a DVD—so I am not susceptible to that particular attempt to poison my thought processes.

As I was coming to work today, I heard a news story on the radio about how the second presidential debate will be in a town hall format, with the participants all being uncommitted voters. Who in this superheated political arena is uncommitted any more? Doesn’t one have to be stupid or disingenuous at this point to be truly labeled uncommitted? I am as committed as hell, and I don’t want to talk to anyone about it.

In about a month, all this will be over and done with. We will have a president with whom we will be dissatisfied, to a greater or lesser degree; and the media blitz will have died down to nothing.

All those Citizens United dollars will have wreaked their damage on the American voter, who will be increasingly contemptuous of our political system. Sometimes I think the only people who like our system are those directly involved in manipulating public opinion.

In the middle of a hurricane, the only safe place to be is in out of the wind.

Picture Credit: The above cartoon is taken from the Fremd High School American Studies Ning (?!), which also addresses the same point I am trying to make.

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Strange Reasoning for a Guy

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First Lady Michelle Obama

This is going to sound like strange reasoning for a male of the species, but one of the main reasons why I want to see Barack Obama win a second term as President is my preference for Michelle Obama over Anne Romney.

Not that I have anything particular against Mrs. Romney, other than the fact that she is a blah corporate wife, but that Michelle Obama is nothing short of magnificent. If I were married to her, I certainly would not go canoodling with chubby interns. In fact, I would not mind if she were the President.

Listen to these words from her speech at the convention in Charlotte:

So today, when the challenges we face start to seem overwhelming – or even impossible – let us never forget that doing the impossible is the history of this nation…it’s who we are as Americans…it’s how this country was built.

And if our parents and grandparents could toil and struggle for us…if they could raise beams of steel to the sky, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with the touch of a button…then surely we can keep on sacrificing and building for our own kids and grandkids.

And if so many brave men and women could wear our country’s uniform and sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights…then surely we can do our part as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights…surely, we can get to the polls and make our voices heard on Election Day.

If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire…if immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores…if women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote…if a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time…if a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream…and if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Because in the end, more than anything else, that is the story of this country – the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.

Damn! She’s even a better speaker than Barack—and that’s saying a lot!

Compared to her, all the generations of Romneys are stumbling bozos (except maybe for George Romney, whom I respected far more than I do his son).