Everything you ever wanted to know about the world's most expensive election but were afraid to ask: Here's the tale of the single-most psychotic leadership-selection method, and in the world's most heavily-armed nation -- a country totally unafraid to randomly flex its military and financial might, whimsically, this way or that -- and it can be found right here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20163081
It provides a crisp, clear 3-minute view of the infernal inferno of an election process we bright Americans have created for ourselves and then rapidly, placidly accepted -- if we dare look, and if we dare see.
At "only" $2.5 billion, this is the most expensive election in history -- about 20 bucks a vote. Great use of money, making teevee stations rich? Go ahead, make yourself crazy: Take ten seconds to wonder what else that money could have done instead. OK, you should stop now, before you really hurt yourself.
Super PACs alone raised $600 million, with just 1% of donors giving 60% of the money. This seem right to you? How about the ability -- thank you, activist SCOTUS -- to donate as much as you want without having to identify who it is giving the money? That seem OK, too, to let anyone try to buy the election?
There are other equally disturbing things, too. How about a political party based on rotating mountains of lies, and enough candidate secrecy to stuff Mount Everest full -- and a standard kit bag of dirty tricks large enough to stash the moon right inside?
There's something truly frightening about a secretive, impulsive, bully of a liar attracting even one fog-bound voter for the office of dog catcher, let alone drawing half the nation's voters onto a shaky platform that hides such a vast cesspool of lies, special interests, connections, favors, and such a wide assortment of dirty dealings and howlingly un-American tricks.
This is the standard Republican platform supporting a marathon run for President of the United States. It should be laughed into a pile of splinters, as not being even good enough to support a dog catcher's election. But, it won't be. It will be wildly cheered.
No, you're not psychotic, you didn't miss your meds. This is today's Republican party. Without the rose-colored glasses and media mind-conditioning, their brown shirts actually come in nice and clear.
And the much-cobbled thought emerges again: Fascism is here on shore, wrapped in the flag, waving a cross around. What shall we do about it? Why, nothing, of course. We have a champion to applaud, along with his many accomplishments!
You know... I wonder if Hitler's audience was like this -- hypnotically sedate, and that blank, deer-in-headlights, "what, me?" sort of glare -- before he was elected, having made promises people were desperately hungry to hear...
But, on to the candidate's tally of jolly good deeds!
Gut American jobs, rake off the pension funds, stash the money offshore, tax-free? Hoorah!
Brag about business prowess after obtaining governments funds that bailed out Bain, and another, to save the fabled butt of the Olympics? Huzzah!
Develop no real monetary plan aside from mandating another few trillion dollars in tax cuts for the uber-wealthy, on the backs of the middle class and poor? What a man!
Be ready to drown the military in more money than they asked for, while telling needy Americans they'll have to keep yanking on their already-tight belts? Woo-hoo, Mittens!
Put Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all right on the chopping block, devastating tens of millions of Americans for decades to come -- handing over that last, final, huge chunk of money to Wall Street, for another round of casino operations? Yeaaaaaa, Romney!
Be running the equivalent of a 3-card monte game's mathematics in calculating the country's revenue and spending plans, doing calculations on the back of a cocktail napkin after Round Number Nine -- or was this Number Fourteen? Willard's the one!
Brag about your blistered and blighted business experience, as a positive? Ballsy, Mittster!
Defend the idea that running a country is just exactly like your days in business, when running the government of 311 million people country is no more like running a business than sitting in a big, cardboard box, pretending to be astronauts, going skoooooooooooshzz! is anywhere close to actually doing the hard work of laboring toward going to the moon -- and then going? Yes, he's our boy!
How many more years do you have, good reader, to keep reading and keep listening? These are not isolated incidents -- they are the core of the man: Lie, cheat, steal -- I'm entitled, I'm rich, don't try to tell me I can't do whatever I want! These true tales can be told all day and all night, for months and months.
They are no more small wrinkles and teeny speedbumps in Romney's character any more than the Rockies are just some small bunches of scrunched-up rock and no more than the Alps are only little lumps one can jump right over.
Say one thing, do another -- the Dubya rule, but, all grown up now, roaming around loose outside its crib, no longer Baby Kong but some out-of-control creature climbing the Empire State Building.
Sure: Tell everyone you love your country, but hide all your money somewhere else, where you don't have to pay any taxes to that supposedly-beloved country. Tell everyone your cult is off limits for questions, even though JFK was grilled about his connections to the Vatican if elected. We need to ask you more about magic undies and Kolob, you know.
Sure, go ahead and explain you'll be hard as nails on China, your main trading partner and principal receiver of jobs you shoved offshore and overseas. You remember, Mittsy -- China, the country that's handed you fortune after fortune.
No, we don't care that you're rich, Mitt, even though it's from appalling and monstrous business practices that would make zombies, vampires, and vultures blush -- it's capitalism, so we understand the mighty victors are those who pillage, rape, and decimate the Earth, and who show no mercy to anything except profit.
It's just that, well, Mitt -- most Americans hate liars, tax cheats, thieves, sneaks, connivers, cowards, cult members, charlatans, snake-oil vendors, and all the rest of the things that you are, and clearly show that you are, and have always shown that you are.
At least, Americans always used to.
Now, who knows? Maybe it's fine to vote for someone who demands to be trusted with a whole country, but who can't be bothered to give us reasons to trust you? Someone who insults Americans as "you people" for daring to ask for a fewer number of tax returns your own father filed when he ran? Fewer than you gave McCain's camp for a look-see before turning you down?
Someone who wants the nuclear football but can't stop offending and insulting friends and allies abroad on photo-op tours -- someone who is consistently on the wrong side of every diplomatic, financial, and policy issue imaginable?
Looks like we don't mind someone who's forgotten if he's retired or not. After all, Mitty, you are just like us, because all the rest of us make $10,000 bets, too! Heck, Mitt -- we see you're just like us, after saying a quarter of a million dollars is a middle-class wage! You're one of us, all right, because every one of us make your kind of "not very much money" from our own speeches we give, and we each get $350,000 we get when we make them, too!
You think rich women should stay home with the kids, but poor moms need to drop their pups quick, then get on back to work? You endorse hordes of Republicans who voted overwhelmingly to defeat a small thing like equal pay for women? You back crates and crates of scumbag Republican politicians who believe rape is a gift from God, and that a woman has no right to privacy in her medical care -- that government has every right to get between a woman and her doctor, performing what amounts to enforced medical rape on women to satisfy your tests?
Say, how many women on your all-male health panels? Oh, right: None. How many pro-religion, anti-science Republicans on the Science committees? Oh right: All of them.
Quick, Mitt -- how many mansions do you have, counting vacation homes? How many have dancing horses in them? How many have car elevators? Yeah -- you're just exactly like us, we can see that. We can see that you'll be a real champion for the average person.
Just like when you had a chance to greenlight elevators for disabled persons, but thought better of it and said no. If they'd only been disabled horses, you'd have said yes, right, Mitt?
Could you reveal any better than you have, your spoiled-rich-boy sense of entitlement, than by holding down a man with your fellow-bully pals, and giving that scared man a forced haircut? That must have made you feel powerful, and special, Mitt. This one right here is the key image of the real you, Willard, right along with getting your kicks, playing dress-up as a policeman, then going out to pull people over, hassle them, and get a little power lift, right?
Between your frightening need to bully and frighten people, forcing actions upon them, and your scary need for lording power over people -- why, Mitt... Your sense of fair play, and your wife's concern for your mental state -- should you be elected -- I'd say you're an A-Number-One candidate, hooray!
After all: You're rich, you're entitled, you've never had anyone ever tell you, "NO!" and made it stick, have you? It's always been my life, my very own way. And, it's your turn now, to be President, isn't it? It's your right -- correct?
Dubya was a spoiled rich boy who always got what he wanted, and he had to beat his daddy by invading Iraq. Let's see: You're a spoiled rich boy who always got what he wanted, and now you want to beat your daddy, be President, and -- let us guess -- invade Iran. You Republicans just crack us regular people up with your high spirits and sense of humor!
Oh, Mittsy -- you've convinced half a country that constant jabbering, ill manners, overtalking, cross-talking, interrupting, hogging the floor, and babbling incessantly in an endless, empty stream, now somehow qualifies as strong, bold leadership!
...that an utter absence of specifics on your plans to govern constitutes a by-golly, good-enough reason to cast a vote in your direction.
... that you and Republicans have spent more than three years heroically blocking jobs bills -- even for returning troops -- to help prevent the country from recovering fully and keep an incumbent from looking like a winner to one and all -- was great policy and not racist treason.
... that Republicans, politicians you back, would waste millions and vote 33 times against the Affordable Care Act, while not fronting a single piece of legislation to provide jobs or get the country back on its feet -- hoping the country and its people would instead crash, so you could swoop in, pick up the pieces on the cheap, and "rescue" us from success -- was sheer brilliance!
... that politicians you endorse have spent 3-plus years trying to pump through nothing but abortion bills and holy-roller laws letting them loose in the nation's schools and offices -- what a great use of time, taxpayer money and energy!
Are you completely mad? Well, of course you are, Willard. But that hasn't dented your psycho's cunning and ability to lure voters closer.
If voters knew even half of the vile, revolting, treacherous things you have done -- and are deep inside -- they would sooner climb into an old, occupied coffin than vote for you. Not that voting for you isn't suicide and certain death. Because, it sure as hell is.
But, then -- Republicans have been getting lots and lots of votes for decades, being the perfect suck-up friend to corporations, and without doing one single, solitary thing for the average voter. Not ever. Not even once.
Now, that's what I call black magic.
* * * * *
What to say about a country where a candidate's son has a company interest in Ohio voting machines? Or about the need for battalions and brigades of lawyers to disperse throughout the country to protect citizens' rights to vote? Or about the laughable security of the vote-casting-and-counting process?
What do you say about a Party that has so little to offer to people that they must spend all their time trying to cheat the system to win?
What do you say to a Party that tries to stop needed and good work from being done for people and their country at all costs, lest the incumbent get a thumbs-up?
What do you say about the Republican Party -- a group that so routinely invests a Herculean amount of effort -- time, money, energy, planning, and people -- to suppress, intimate, and confuse voters?
... to keep voters for the opposition turned away, their votes discarded, people hassled at polls -- whatever it takes to tilt and slant the odds in your favor, using every conceivable dirty trick in the books?
To keep office-holders making changes in voting laws and processes at the last minute, in the last 30 days before an election -- Abracadabra, too late to stop me now!
How about relying on endlessly-pounded themes of fear, racism, pleas for birth certificates, charges of Socialism -- when the incumbent is further center-right than most Republican presidents in history have been!
The kicker is relying on a candidate all ready to jigger another war -- one who talked up a great amount of praise for the draft and for the Vietnam War, and said he really, really wanted to go fight... except that he had to get a student deferment from the draft, and then, of course, it was time to go proselytize in France. Trooping around in southeast Asia, getting shot at, somehow never found its way onto your chickenhawk menu.
Maybe if you put all your sons in the front line of the leading wave into Iran, you can correct that little shortcoming of yours, Mitsy.
Mitt, you and your Party's actions are just plain inhuman, revolting, and against the God you always say you hold dear, and yet violate at every possible opportunity and turn.
If it wasn't for the insane, right-wing media propaganda machine, and the steady drumbeat of fear and racism, and people's ignorance and inability to think for themselves, and the selfish, self-centered, bratty behavior of simple-minded Teabaggers called together by billionaires to do their bidding ... I wonder how many votes you'd get then?
If we still had a functioning, watchdog press? If people would look at the facts -- even the small ones that show huge flaws in judgment and character, like you buying $5,000 in goods to stage a Hurricane Sandy donation photo-op during an actual disaster?
Or, like Ryan forcing his way into a soup kitchen after all the diners and almost all staff were gone, long enough to stop in for 15 minutes on his way to the airport, put on an apron, and have some pics made of him, washing some already-clean pots and pans?
You and your party are vile. You deserve nothing but the complete shunning of our society and all its people, be stripped of your assets, and sent into exile -- only after exiting through a very long gauntlet of shouting, booing, cat-calling, ripe-tomato-throwing, righteously-indignant and honestly-outraged Americans.
Instead, you will be applauded and cheered by people tricked by your sneer and your smile, paid off with your wealth, hypnotized into blaming someone else for your own crimes. They will willingly surrender everything they have to you, and to the top One Percent, in order for you to have the very best life you could ever possibly have on this Earth.
You are an offensive blight and scar on life, liberty, and country as the founders hoped would thrive. We were warned. And, clearly, we could not keep their Republic. It has been long slipping, and is now all but lost, to you and your corporate kind.
My greatest blessing -- and may it be the people's as well: May your God exist, and may you be held to account for your every, and many, continuing, ongoing, unending trespasses. Amen.
* * * * *
It must have been Republicans who pushed the "fall back," clock-changing date to the Sunday before election day -- just one more dirty trick to keep as many people off balance as possible.
There are some fine grimacing opportunities to be had, estimating the number of voters who will be confused about poll operating hours, given this minor clock adjustment. Maybe the same number of sheeple who will wind up in Romney's column, clueless they've simultaneously bolstered a sociopathic liar -- and that Party and game-playing style -- with a vote, while cutting their own throat.
Well, we can always amuse ourselves by throwing some chicken bones, pretend like the fix isn't in this time, and kill some time with some predictions. We can escape into humor and light amusement, to relive the tension, checking out small facts and factoids about elections of the past -- whatever a condemned people do, while waiting for the closing moments to tick by, before everything changes, and forever.
I wonder how many regular people the psychos will take with them, when their whole rickety, jerry-rigged shebang of a steamboat, piled high with claptrap thinking, and vacuous, blind-leading-the-blind leadership, goes right over the cliff, everyone still in their happy-days-trance and hallelujah bliss?
One, one-thousand. Two, one-thousand...
I hear it's a 49-count to the bottom. Pass it on.
About that $2.5 billion election: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20163081
Lawyers: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/02/campaigns-mobilise-lawyers-election-ground-game
Election oddities primer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20072338
For medicated numbers junkies only: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19415745
Can we trust the vote? http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/02/3079851/as-election-looms-many-voters.html
The latest, newest Republican dirty tricks:
4) http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-city/index.ssf/2012/11/oregon_department_of_justice_i.html
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http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-city/index.ssf/2012/11/oregon_department_of_justice_i_1.html
