Sadder Daze

Donny Dimwit made a lengthy speech at a Black Conservative Federation event that was apparently also attended by a significant number of white folks. Now he's apparently convinced himself that because he's been indicted for multiple felonies, many black voters will switch their support from the Democratic Party to MAGA. If he actually believes that, Dimwit's stupider than a shit-eating hound dog.

If black voters really are moving to MAGA, they obviously need comprehensive refresher courses in white nationalism & white supremacy.

In South Carolina MAGA primary, with about 90% of the votes counted, Dimwit leads Nikki Haley 60%-40%. Imagine that: roughly forty percent of (R) voters want somebody other than Dimwit. He can't lose that many (R) voters in November and still win.

Vote for the Republicant or don't vote!

@ Juanita Jean's: If you're a member of the GOP, the probability is that you're old, white, and nuttier than a goddamned fruitcake. No one who doesn't meet at least two of those criteria wants to be in their club, so Republicans are always trying to tilt election odds in their favor by suppressing votes.

Gimmicks

Without the Electoral College to help them, Republicans are basically dead in the water. There aren't enough of them left to win without a gimmick. They've won the popular vote once in the last seven presidential elections, and that one was close. 

Arizona

Scary thought going through the minds of all Republican assholes: Every time all the votes get counted, we lose! We fucked!

Security? Really?

I'm sorry, but for some reason the idea of Donnie Dim heading up a meeting devoted to election security doesn't really have me breathing a huge sigh of relief. Donnie's the guy that I think of as calling Putin and saying, "Door's open, boss. Come on in."

This looks and smells like another of Donnie's dog-and-pony shows, staged for Fox News by people who owe a lot to Russian interference in American elections. Maybe I'll be wrong, and for once, he'll actually do something that helps people who didn't vote for him.

Updated 9:19 PM same day: Well, that went just as expected. Less than 30 minutes, then off to play golf. Fat, repulsive, worthless bucket of monkey fuck.

Updated 3:26 PM Saturday 28 July: The names of those who attended the dog-and-pony show are listed in a story at Politicus. I invite anyone to read the names on the list, then tell me if anyone attended who might give a rat's ass about Russia rigging elections. Dan Coats and Christopher Wray? Maybe.

Florida (again)

USA Today reports a poll in Florida showing Mitt Romney would beat Obama in that state if the election were held today. The election isn't being held today and even if it was, I wouldn't count on Mormon Mitt being the GOP nominee. As long as the evangelunicals think Mormons are an evil Satanic cult, Mitt has a tough row to hoe. Then there's Hucklebuck, who also leads Obama, but is hedging about getting into the fray and might not be able to survive a slugfest with Bachmann. News stories like this one are a clue that newspapers may have too much blank space to fill.

More from Newt Get-Rich

As soon as The Newter makes his official announcement, we can start pointing at him and laughing about this bullshit. Cheating husbands everywhere can blame their lowdown ways on patriotic zeal.

Weirdness ? Really ?

Here's how bad things are getting on the right side of the aisle: intellectual conservatives like George Will are writing columns about the weirdness and general creepiness of the Fox News Channel faction of potential 2012 presidential nominees (Hucklebuck and Newt Getrich). Nothing on Palin in this column, but give it time.

The obvious Republican tactic is to associate Obama with Kenya and the Mau Mau uprising in the minds of voters. This sounds like a good plan if the only voters you're interested in reaching are the ones who think Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin would make a neat president (the ones with double-digit IQs, in other words).

Anybody but that N...

It's never too early for CNN polls about elections that are nearly two years in the future.

In this one, Republicans reveal their desperation by claiming they want a 2012 nominee who can beat Obama, even if he/she doesn't agree with them on issues. So much for ideological purity, which we were told was paramount in the 2010 mid-term voting. About one third of those in the CNN poll swear they'll definitely vote against Obama. This is consistent with other findings supporting my contention that 30-35 percent of Americans are hardcore conservative deadenders who should be confined to detention camps rather than allowed to mingle with decent people.

The CNN poll has Hucklebuck leading the field by an insignificant margin, followed closely by The Snowbunny and Mormon Mitt. Of those three, Romney would be my choice, especially if he can avoid the disgusting appeals to lowest-common-denominator Republicans that marked his 2008 campaign. Pandering doesn't look good on him. Down the list we find Newt Gingrich and Haley Barbour, throwbacks to the 90s who make Hucklebuck look good in comparison.

Good Old Days

The best line in Paul Krugman's column today is the statement that the only thing about George W. Bush that Republicans didn't love was his approval rating. It's been comical to watch Republican voters who now call themselves the Tea Party trying to put some distance between themselves and the eight years of W's administration. For a while, I wondered how W had gotten all those votes in 2004, since so many conservatives were claiming they hadn't supported him.

Now the GOP has decided that, considering the limited attention span of most Americans, they can pin the blame for everything that's wrong on Obama and get away with it. They're right, and the theme for 2013 will be "Happy days are here again." 

Tea time ?

People like Ron Fournier of the AP keep writing stories about them, so I can't ignore the teapeople as easily as I want to. The media keep speculating about the impact the teapeople will have in the 2010 and 2012 elections; I don't honestly know but my guess is that it'll be much less than media writers think.

First, the Tea Party isn't really a party in the conventional sense. The people who wear the label probably chose it because it has historical connotations, and because tea bags are readily available at a reasonable price. Even the Democrats are more organized than the Tea Party, which tells me something.

Second, the teapeople are not a new voting bloc emerging out of primordial goo. These people have been voting, and from what I've seen, most of them have been voting a long time. The vast majority have been voting for Republicans. If you can find a teaperson who voted for Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004, and Obama in 2008, I'll buy you a Starbucks. If you can find one who voted for the Dem in any ONE of those elections, I'll buy you a soda pop.

So what we have are a bunch of aging, disgruntled Republicans who voted for Bush/Cheney both times, and may have grumbled a little about budget deficits over the checkerboard --- but only got motivated to join a traveling dog-and-pony show when The N and Democrats started planning the budget. Now they're claiming to be an independent movement, but in reality they're only a Republican splinter group that adds very few votes, if any, to the totals the GOP is already getting.

Third, being made up largely of geezers with too much free time on their hands and lacking even a fraction of the organization of a scatterbrained mob like the Democrats, the Tea Party won't be fielding any candidates of their own. All they can do is try to muscle the GOP into nominating a waste of oxygen like Sarah Palin, or even worse, a Palin wannabe like Rick Perry (the main difference between the two being that Ricardo wouldn't resign his governorship if his worthless life depended on it).

Maybe the Republicans can nominate a candidate like Palin and win a national election in 2012. Strange things happen in American politics. But in reality, Palin was the de facto head of the GOP ticket in 2008, at least in terms of media attention and publicity, and she lost pretty badly to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. My hunch is that there are still a lot of moderate, independent voters out there who aren't happy about things, but aren't so dissatisfied that they've started dangling teabags from their sombreros. The Republicans need a big chunk of those voters, and I don't see how they'll get them by jumping through hoops to placate a splinter group like the teapeople.

Another conservative David

Like David Brooks, David Frum is a conservative who is sometimes willing to examine both sides of an issue and isn't totally predictable. Both Davids occasionally stray away from the GOP reservation, making them worth reading from time to time. Frum posted this update on his Forum blog, and throws a slightly different slant on the status of the health care reform fiasco.

I'll repeat the point I've been making all year, namely that Republicans cannot allow health care reform to see the light of day. They've spent most of 2009 talking about how the Democratic proposal will destroy America, but what they REALLY worry about is the opposite. If a reasonably popular set of reforms are enacted and are reasonably successful in improving the status quo for voters, the public calms down, the overheated rhetoric tails off, and Republican support drops back down to bedrock (teabagger) level, roughly 30 percent. If Obama and the Democrats hold the reins of power in Washington until the economy begins its inevitable recovery, Republicans may not get their hands on them again for a decade.

For the GOP, these are perilous times requiring extreme measures. Stay tuned to see what they come up with next.

Sickening

I was a Howard Dean fan in 2004, and was disappointed when his campaign ran aground and left John Kerry to try unseating the Bush-Cheney-Rove triumvirate. In the Washington Post, Dean seems to be telling it like it is --- again. The health care reform debacle is enough to stagger the imagination. It would be bad enough if Republicans were running the train off the tracks --- after all, wrecking stuff is the one thing they do well and it's what I expect from them. Unfortunately the GOP is getting tons of help from the Democrats, help they didn't need to fuck things up royally.

I predict that after making a total botch of everything in 2009, Democrats will start their journey back to the wilderness of political minority in 2010, and their decline will pick up momentum heading into 2012. In itself, that wouldn't be too bad since the Dems have proven they aren't really capable of running things anyway. The worst part is that conservatives in general, and Republicans in particular, have been driven absolutely insane by the horrifying sight of those Ns in the White House. As bad as Republicans were during the Reagan years, the Gingrich years, and the Bush-Cheney-Rove years, they're going to be much, much worse in 2012. In 2004, for example, no one had heard of Winky or Beck; now they're the superstars of the party. The small number of good (i.e., moderate, sensible) Republicans has dwindled down to almost zero, and the lunatics really are running the asylum.

In short, the Democrats not only blew every golden opportunity they were handed in 2008, they've made it possible, even likely, that we'll get at least four years of government (2013-2016) that will make 2001-2008 look tolerable in comparison.

Added 9:54 am on Thursday: Lo and behold, E.J. Dionne makes the argument much more intelligently than I can.

Added 10:36 am Thursday: Taylor Marsh, who blogs for real, adds her analyis of this stinking mess at Huffington Post.

More disgusting possibilities

Paul Burka of Texas Monthly makes a case for the possibility that Rick Perry will run for president in 2012. Let me put it this way: if Obama's presidency fails so miserably that Perry is able to even get near the White House, I'll be as discouraged about America and the Democrats as I've ever been. I can easily see Perry winning the GOP nomination, considering the level to which the party has fallen. Whether he could win the EC is another matter --- but I've learned the hard way that about 60 percent of the time, American voters will do the dumbest things.

I keep thinking that all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the lunatics are still a minority in this country, somewhere around thirty percent, and definitely no more than forty. I hope that's not just wishful thinking.