LAST week someone--I negligently failed to note who--said that Colbert hid the utmost seriousness of purpose behind being silly, while the Media hides its profound silliness behind a guise of seriousness. So:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry will end his bid for the Republican presidential nomination today and is expected to endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.
Gingrich himself said via email this morning that all he knows is “not much. Rumors.”
[Emphasis mine.] Please, It's too late to start. And if you've decided to anyway, please aim little higher. Like off the ground.
Here's a couple of ideas: 1) What are we supposed to make of the profound silliness at the center of the Republican presidential race? and 2) Why aren't any Republicans bothered by it?
J. R. "Rick" Perry has been governor of The Republic of Texas for eleven fucking years, during which he had amply demonstrated that his wits, while perhaps sufficient to manage the world's largest manure field, fall quite a bit short of what's required for serious national office, even in our debased age. Yet Perry was treated as a Force that demanded reckoning with, long before he entered with a pratfall, and it became okay to laugh at him.
Now he's gonna toss to Gingrich, a liar, a blowhard, the world's least credible academician, a petty criminal yet too incompetent to try covering his tracks, a racist, a despiser of pettier thieves, as well as the less fortunate, and a smug little doughboy with the morals, and ethics, of a syphilitic polecat. The Press doesn't like the man. Not for any of the above, but because he speaks down to them instead of offering professional courtesy.
Four years after it nominated a laughingstock to be Vice President of the United States--and learned that she was wildly more popular among the faithful than the War Hero in the top slot--the Party of Burke Weekends at David Brooks' has offered up two talking hairdos and six--make that eight--certifiable lunatics. At every debate stop the Republican rank and file cheers, loudly and long, for dog-whistle racism, cheery threats of political violence, and expressions of a fervent and twisted distaste for anything approximating reality. What does Brooks have to say about it? What does George Eff Will have to say about it? "Gee, I wish Mitch Daniels was running"
Yeah, let's not forget George Eff Will, or his disclosure problems (Unlike Fred Hiatt).
ReplyDelete~
As if Mitch Daniels would be any different.
ReplyDeleteHis economic miracles would disappear like Romney's 100,000 jobs. Timothy Durham would resonate like Bain Capital. Daniels would have the advantage over Gingrich in marital history and the advantage over Bachman in height.
What Brooks and Will are really saying is they haven't taken the time to scrutinize Mitch Daniels. They get paid for their opinions, not their research.
Excuse me, but isn't this where you typically try to talk me out of anarchy?
ReplyDeleteYou're doing it wrong.
It would be interesting if the USA broke apart into 3 or four countries. The Confederacy, The East, The West and the Flyover country. Would there be a mass exodus from the -cough- conservative areas to the East & West coasts? I live in Reno NV- would I flee to Calif? Interesting Times, indeed.
ReplyDeleteKWillow:
ReplyDeleteI fervently believe LINCOLN WAS WRONG. Not only because of the 600,000 dead and the fact that the North cravenly allowed the South to torpedo Reconstruction within a generation but because Lincoln helped/facilitated the kind of consolidated, transnational, government-sponsored corporatism that is creaking and groaning on its last legs today.