Charles Pierce (Esquire): "The Republican party, root and branch, is now completely barking mad." [View all]

[highplainsdem]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-florida-campaign-6648231

I am supposed to write now about how Willard Romney, the only presidential candidate in history to run as his own animatronic double, got his swerve on, his mojo back, and his engorged pen... no, wait, let me start again. I am supposed to write about how Willard Romney, a man with the charisma of grass seed and the political principles of a moray eel, became a newly formidable candidate after his thumping by Newt Gingrich among the holy-rolling swamp-runners in South Carolina. I read in yesterday's New York Times that, after failing the ultimate test of his Gooberhood, Willard fled to one of his several Fortresses of Solitude, only to emerge in Florida as a lean, mean pompodoured war beast:

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The next two weeks are going to be the test. Not so much of the relative strengths or the relative electability or (God help us) the relative merits of the remaining four Republican candidates for president but, rather, of exactly how much we as a country intend to be fooled by clumsy dumbshow, and of exactly how firmly our elite media will dedicate itself once again to the task of draping togas over gibbering grifters, obvious charlatans, and transparent mountebanks. There has been made an heroic effort all year to ignore the two most obvious stories of the campaign: a) the deforming power of corporate money in our politics, especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision, and b) that, as evidenced by the field of candidates it coughed up to oppose a still very vulnerable incumbent president, the Republican party, root and branch, is now completely barking mad.

Consider the various "frontrunners" we've gone through. Michele Bachmann was a frontrunner after the Iowa Straw Poll because she proved herself to be the best one at off-loading elderly white people from buses. (This qualifies her to be marketing director of a reservation casino, but not much else). Herman Cain was a frontrunner for a while because everybody chose not to notice what a crackpot he is. The idea that the haunts of ancient sexytime brought him down, and not the fact that his "bold ideas" would've turned this country into Albania with baseball, is indication enough of how shabbily rigged the puppet show is this time around. Sometime in the middle of last fall, it became impolite to point out that the Republican party was offering to the nation the most obviously unqualified, nakedly prevaricating, and altogether stumble-brained clown college since the last Ringling Brother died.

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Instead, we got stories questioning how Rick Perry might "turn it around," and the people writing them had to work really hard to pretend that, "Learn freaking English, cowboy." wasn't the most obvious answer. We got endless speculation about what The Base was thinking, without any acknowledgement that The Base was the whole damn problem. If it were not, then Willard Romney wouldn't have had to spend the last two years making himself look so ridiculous. Meanwhile, those two most basic stories were lost amid a cacophony of absurd talking points and luxuriously financed bullshit on the airwaves. Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina came and went, and were declared inconclusive because Gingrich was able to race-bait a campaign to a victory in that particular tactic's home office, and now Florida is going to be hailed as a breakthrough because the obvious nominee has toughened himself up with a new posse drawn from the Bloods of the Heritage Foundation and the Crips of the American Enterprise Institute. Gang truce!

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