Link: McCain vs. the Right Wing - A Capital View (usnews.com).
Link: A Rapid City Journal politics blog : Coulter announces for Clinton (end times near).
Link: Right rallies to halt John McCain as he marches to Super Tuesday - Times Online.
I was hitting the Sunday morning talk shows, feeling great pregnant anticipation toward Super Tuesday being one of the INTERESTING news days in the recent history of the U.S. This fun alone is worth the price of admission. Could brokered conventions be coming?!
But the MOST FUN (and that is saying a lot, given the ups and downs of Senators Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, either of whom will win in November, because the electorate will overwhelmingly choose the #1 candidate running, ANYBODY BUT THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE US BUSH).
The winner will be the Anti-Bush.
So Dems vs GOP is not a real race by real numbers (although you won't hear that in the formulaic-balance enforcing press).
Drama? Oh, this is as good as it gets. The Beltway Far Right Wingnuts are in an absolute DITHER! Ann Coulter is crapping her pants and threatening to hold her breath until she passes out, or, barring that, to campaign for Hillary Clinton! Pat Robertson blew his wad by officially backing hypocrisy in the form of a candidate he thought had the best chance to win, a candidate that is no longer in the race. Bwah-ha-ha-ha!
I have many friends who are evangelical Christians, and they were not buying this idea of getting their marching orders from the "Beltway Church." Gotta love those Protestant types. They tend to protest against admonitions to goose-step. I worried about them losing their collective soul in the past 8 years, but a number of them seem to be waking up, and they will undoubtedly continue to register their protest by hanging with Huckabee to the very end.
And Huckabee? How much fun is he? He may be nutters when it comes to science and other social issues that national pols usually are conditioned to hide from their public statements by handlers before they reach the kinds of audiences Huckabee is reaching, but I knew of the guy when he was overweight and just a local pol, and I'll give him credit for one thing: unlike the Machiavellian "Christians" who have ruled their followers like fascist bosses for the past eight years, Huckabee is a true believer. He actually cares about what Jesus said and taught, and he intends to follow that to the best of his ability. I'm not sure about the full powers of his ability, but I am certain that he can't be bought, and that's why the sincere evangelicals are loving him too. At least I hope so.
But why are the dominant media far right wingnuts in such a lather over McCain? He is quite conservative. Neither Nixon nor Goldwater would question his conservative credentials, nor either, I expect, would George H.W. Bush.
What they don't like is his independence (I still question it, to tell you the truth, given his last 3 years of pathetically sucking up to Bush), and that is what gives me all this giddy joy. I had given up on those adamant red staters when I figured out they lusted so deeply for a stranglehold on power that they were willing to get in bed with crooks and take marching orders from intellectually-challenged sound-biters.
People in the Red States are more purple than that, and I beg their apology for what I thought about them in the past. It was because I couldn't imagine ANYONE but a sonambulistic sheep giving up critical thinking abilities and free agency to embrace idiots simply because they held the keys to power.
See, I could follow the reasoning that could lead them there: a principle of religious authority that places ALL power in the hands of a god who demands exact obedience and no independent thought, a god who uses power as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, winnowing the world into an end game of absolute bliss or absolute punishment.
But how could reasonable human beings accept demagogic human agents who claimed to be God's ventriloquist dummies? That one stumped me. And thankfully, those with a history of rebelling against religious authorities, those who "get" the impulse behind Protestantism, have reappeared.
So the hilarity now, is watching what happens when the bullying bloviators who so love the power they feel when they speak with the royal "We" of "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here," the Talk Radio and Freeper repeaters who think they are in the cool kids group in high school, HAVE LOST THEIR GANG.
What a case study in mass media theory! What a fascinating development! Leaders are leaders only when they take a risk, seize a moment, and earn a following. When they lose their following, they stand there, hanging their asses out on the end of a cracking branch, all by themselves.
But those bloviators still have the soapboxes and media platforms with corporate funding, where they hold forth as if nothing as changed, as if the electorate remains a button to be pushed, sheep which they herd, a goose-stepping army that they control, absolutely.
And there's McCain and Romney. Oh, Beltway GOP Media Wingnuts are plenty pissed at Huckabee, because they require scapegoats to blame (to avoid having the realize they are to blame for becoming drunk on power). Huckabee's the spoiler, they say. They say he's the only reason the Romney isn't our front runner (a Massachusetts Mormon governor... go figure, they got some slim pickings when the overwhelmingly winning candidate MUST be the Anti-Bush).
If I saw anything in the primaries so far, Romney is, in the words of David Letterman, a TV weatherman, a prop, a corporate prop, and somehow people sense that, feel nothing in the face of his candidacy, in spite of the money machine and now, the power players in the GOP, rallying behind him. He's got everyone behind him, that is, except real voters.
That hasn't been a problem in the past for the GOP, with companies like Diebold, ChoicePoint, and others able to scrub voter rolls, gerrymander districts, or reduce the numbers of polling places. But what happens when even the people in your gerrymandered districts turn against you? Will you, in your lust for power, accept the loss, or in desperation, turn to embrace the REALLY nutty folks who would entertain the idea of a fascist coup?
What is the GOP to do with McCain?! He will be their candidate, because even if Romney wins by some trick at the convention, some devious swift boat machinations (what, will the whisper campaigns agains McCain start up again? He's getting too old to supposedly father more African American children). He isn't even fully enough of an Anti-Bush to run an even race against the Democratic candidate, but even he offends the well-placed Bush Machine people in the party.
But even if McCain loses, he wins, because he and Huckabee would have finally broken the fascist-minded, patronage-driven, on-message stranglehold the authoritarian political bosses have held over the Republican Party, and perhaps something like real Republicans will be able to emerge, Republicans who are not openly purchased tools of the corporations, who do not willingly give absolute obedience to party bosses, who do not rule by only giving out patronage jobs, funding patronage projects, giving aid in disasters only in patronage states.
Patronage is perhaps the most overt tool of authoritarian obedience with this crowd, from K-Street to Main Street, but the second most overt tool is the use of media soapboxes, and "normalizing" far right views in the mainstream media, so that the use of logic and independent thought looks like liberalism, so that even DEMOCRACY appears far too liberal for the bloviators. That's how the voters may finally realize that their media bullies have gone over the boards.
Two days till the Shakedown Cruise! Whoo Hoo!
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