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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Great Trite Hope for a GOP Savior

Most of you will recall the way Fred Thompson was hilariously touted as the big savior of the GOP for 2008 right up to the moment when he became a real candidate to general goggle-eyed guffaws. And the same thing happened with Jindal, with Trump, with Newt 2.0, with Palin (who realized this soon enough to remain a more lucrative not-quite candidate as long as possible instead), and would happen soon enough, too, with Christie the Hutt.

The very same thing will happen once again with the latest would-be GOP savior Rick Perry, and it will happen the moment his whole W.-reborn hick schtick ever gets taken out for a real national spin. No, Virginia, not even here in idiot America do secessionists get to run the countries they also want to run from.

Of course, nobody is going to vote for Michelle Bachmann. America is a diversifying secularizing continent-scaled dysfunctional mess, but it's not a neo-Confederate rump or a Pentecostal Summer Camp pining after mean muscular baby jeebus theocracy. And few who would even contemplate a vote for Romney wouldn't go ahead and vote for the actual half-assed Democrat rather than the phony half-assed Democrat. Besides, Republicans hate Romney in 2011 even more than they hated McCain in 2007, which was always the ugly motor driving these endless desperate GOP Saviors-of-the-Day in the first place.

Despite the media megaphoning of the Summer of Tea and its fulminating sequelae, the truth is almost nobody is buying what the GOP is selling. The GOP may be able to throw wrenches into government to keep public policy from solving actual shared problems and from reflecting what people want and thereby enraging Americans into demoralized acquiescence and all sorts of self-wounding voting-booth behavior, but they can't make people want what Republicans want them to want. Neo-feudal smiley-face serfdom is a hard sell, after all, especially after the generational gambit of soft-peddling feudalism with white-racism via the Southern Strategy no longer gets enough votes to squeak out electoral wins. Eventually the GOP is going to have to change fundamentally to better reflect reality. Unfortunately, they really can destroy the country before that happens (and in so doing amplify the chances of our destroying the world). But there it is.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> . . .Christie the [Pizza] Hut. . .

But Jabba the Hutt has two t's.

;->

jimf said...

BTW, please forgive me if my responses to your political posts are offensively flippant.

It's just that whenever I read about politics (and the Web kind of pushes it in my face), I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience. Like I'm not living on the plane of reality I always thought I was, know what I mean? Or like my blood sugar is too low.

Has it always been like that? I was never a current-events junkie back in the days of print-, radio-, and TV-only media. 'Course, my family were just the sort of folks who would've revered Bill O'Reilly the way I do Bertrand Russell.