Republicans on Mitt

There's only one thing that Mitt Rmoney has been dead solid consistent on: Rich people should pay lower taxes.

Clearing the field

Lost between the end of Trumpapalooza and Arnold's proof that steroids didn't turn his junk completely to Raisinettes, Mike Huckabee dropped out.  Despite persistently polling as a contender.

Why?

Lazarus Methuselah

Time to climb way down and congratulate John McCain on being the nominee of the Republican Party. Winning that would make me retch, but he wanted it.

I've already eaten a small serving of crow about completely writing him off, but it wasn't enough. I thought even with raven feathers stuck in my teeth that he'd lose eventually. So I get to slurp up another serving.

In truth, I underestimated Republican primary voters, which suggests that they are not as hard to the starboard as their party and its wingnut media cheerleaders. They saw through the empty suit of Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee's appeal was too narrow and too poorly funded. I failed to notice how quickly they bailed on Rudy Giuliani, which might have been my first clue that they were smarter than I thought - had I not missed it.

Of course, even I am not cynical enough to anticipate that McCain would move resoundingly toward torture. I mistakenly assumed that his personal experience at the hands of the North Vietnamese would trump every political calculation. Wrong. It must've happened too long ago.

In the end, Republican primary voters held their noses and nominated the only candidate with a chance to win in November. Especially if he games the public campaign finance system, which of course he will.

The nightmare scenario

John McCain, the Republicans' great white-haired hope, is the last man standing. He picks Mike Huckabee to balance the ticket and reunite the bullies and the fundies. The wealthies decide that this is going to work for them.

We Democrats nominate Hillary, but the fight with Obama is too bitter to heal quickly. Hillary picks another bloodless centrist technocrat, say, Bill Richardson to balance the ticket, appeal to the Hispanic vote, and keep it in the Clintonista house.

Duhbya lies low. The swiftboaters find a picture of Hillary walking past a protester holding a sign that says, "Hanoi Hilton is too good for baby-killers," or whatever the Rovians want to Photoshop into it. The MSM says that they have to cover it since Drudge did and the story is in play. And anyway she should have ripped that sign up on the spot.

Sean Hannity wets himself with excitement. Chris Matthews slurs, "See, I told you she was an unfeeling bitch." Rush Limbaugh feels so good that he actually kicks the pills - except for Viagra, Cialis, and every other ED remedy he can shop for. Ann Coulter writes a book called Liberal Torturers, in which she lays all torture in the history of the West and most of the East at the feet of blood-sucking liberals. Inquisition? Liberal Jews in Spain. Jeanne D'Arc? The French, for chrissake. Salem witch trials? Massachusetts!! She appears on the cover as a dominatrix clad in studded black leather.

We need all this circus because the economy is totally in the shitter. The vacillating Dems in Congress fight Duhbya's $150 billion self-stimulus plan to leave no billionaire behind. Then they cave. The Republican media operation successfully blames the Dems for their one-month delay, despite the obvious fact that the stimulus where they applied it couldn't possibly have helped in the vital short run. For that, the money needed to go to people who would spend it, instead of just making their ill-advised investments whole and rewarding bad choices.

McCain wins, and nothing changes.

Nothing, that is, until the cancer comes back on his left cheek or until 2012, when he's 76 and too old to run for reelection.

Make way for President Huckabee!

I didn't say this had a happy ending.

Update: Found that picture!

GOP constituencies

Laughing the pretenders out of town leaves three guys who might just possibly win the Republican nomination, and they're a scary trio. One is an open theocrat and Confederate sympathizer. One will clearly and obviously say anything in the whole damn world to win - no, scratch that, it's worse, he'll say everything at one time or another if that will save the best for numero uno. The third is already 72 years old, though half the fossils in the media (think David Broder) would volunteer tonight to have his baby if only they had wombs, and he has deeply offended all the key Republican constituencies.

There are three constituencies that matter in the modern (ouch, oxymoron) Republican Party:

• fundies - a 2000-year-old human-written book is never wrong
• bullies - my country, right or wrong, I'll kick your ass
• wealthies - pro-business means never having to say you're sorry

Sure, there are gun nuts, xenophobes, and racists, too, spread liberally (ouch again) through the first two categories and even leaking into the third (remember Henry Ford?).

The fundies and the bullies do the work and provide the votes, but the wealthies, true to form, own the party and run the show. The fundies are pretty pissed, uh, are waxing wroth over this. The Bill Clinton penis hunt distracted them for a while, but now again they want to be darn sure that they get their turn before the apocalypse. Some of the loonier fundies need their turn to help bring the apocalypse. As soon as possible. No shit!

GOP standings to date - the pretenders

Eliminate all the options that are impossible and whatever is left, however unlikely, will happen.

Starting with the pretenders:

• Duncan Hunter, who he? He has a delegate because he is a delegate. Shift a few bellwether brain cells, and he could be tied with Rudy Giuliani
• Rudi, ah, Rudi, it's not that we hardly knew ye. It's just that you are too obviously a mean, authoritarian SOB. And to the Republican base, those are your good qualities. I never thought a repeat cross-dresser could win in the Republican Party; his poll numbers were a media creation doomed to die embarrassingly. Except that nothing embarrasses Rudi, not even all that icky personal stuff.
• Fred Thompson was the guy you date, not the guy you marry. Seriously, does that show how gag-a-maggot the Republican Party is, or what? Fred jumped the shark (I am so glad I finally learned what that means) before he even jumped into the race. He wanted the Presidency as a retirement gift, and even the Grand Old Party is not that senescent.

Ron Paul needs a category all to himself. He has managed to attract all the scruffy Objectivists who think they're the second coming of John Galt, whoever he was (the man ain't got no culture), and evidently some of them know how to charge a credit card on the Internet. He's right about Iraq for all the wrong isolationist reasons, and the rest of his platform would have been neandercon in the 19th century, which is where he evidently found a wormhole from which to emerge into contemporary Texas daylight. Good thing, too - in any other state except maybe Louisiana, more people would laugh at him than vote for him. OK, maybe Idaho, too.

More to come...

The year of Huckabee

Will 2008 by Mike Huckabee's year, or is he about to jump the shark? As long as he doesn't last past November 4, I don't really care.

The fact that Huckabee is even in the race testifies to the weakness of the field and the dissatisfaction that even the core constituencies of the Republican feel toward them. Romney would be perfect if he hadn't insincerely moved left for Massachusetts. Giuliani would be perfect if he hadn't been seen so often in a dress - being an asshole is no hindrance. Thompson would be perfect if he could stay awake.

So, Huckabee has an opening, and only the usual owners of the GOP object.

Huckabee is a crazy man, however. He's a wild Christian and evolution-denier. He touts a middle-class-killing federal sales tax of 30% or more, letting the really rich off the hook entirely. He thinks Iraq is an "ideological war on terror".

More Sunday comics blogging

The problem with trying to handicap the Republican field is that they're all so handicapped already. For example, before Fred Thompson dithered away his buzz, I thought he would be the perfect empty vessel into which Republicans could pour their shake 'n' bake cult of personality. He could play another vacuous character on the national stage and quench the silly wingnut thirst for another Ronald Reagan.

But, no, he couldn't even remember his best line from The Hunt for Red October, "Your average Russkie, son, don't take a dump without a plan." Turned out even Jeri didn't have much of a plan to prop up her man without his unmistakable lassitude showing through.

So, the national press corps is back to searching for the dark horse who has the legs to pass Romney and Giuliani. This week it's Huckabee, which really shows how far the lunacy has spread.

Who can unite the plutocrats, the authoritarians, and the theocons? Draft Dick Cheney!

Oxymoron - Presidential Republican

It's hard to imagine that any of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates could possibly close the deal with the voters. Still, one of these cavemen has to win, and after all Duhbya managed. To America's eternal shame, twice.

The Republican frontrunners have serious problems. (Note to Democrats: Start exploiting them now, before the media sets its narrative in permanent ink.) And it's not just that most of them can't keep their flies zipped.

Rudy Giuliani has insinuated his America's Mayor branding into the media narrative, but his real appeal is visceral. Rudy is America's Augusto Pinochet. He is offering to save America from the brown people as long as we don't look too closely at how he does it. This is obviously his appeal to the anti-democratic reactionaries known as strong Republicans. I still don't think even Rudi's faux tough enough to look macho in a dress, and I expect Romney to put cross-dressing fashion ads in heavy rotation if he needs to. If Romney doesn't, those of us on the left need to.

Mitt Romney is slippery, a completely shameless and craven opportunist, which is why he'll nudge-nudge-wink-wink some 529 to go after Rudi. From what he says in public, you can tell his only core conviction is me, me, me. In the primary season, he's one step away from executing women who have abortions. Should he win the nomination, he'll try to average his pro-choice positions from Massachusetts with his current positions. He believes in the power of false advertising to do this. If he were not Mormon, he'd be the frontrunner.

Fred Thompson is everything wrong with Washington - and I don't mean the May-December sex. He's a vacuous media creation who has been double-dealing his entire career, starting with leaking Watergate Select Committee investigative direction to the Nixon White House. While he seems like the perfect Republican candidate - lazy but can hit his marks and deliver a line with that great voice - he missed his window of opportunity. The summer stock Hamlet role bored us with too many rehearsals. And, by the way, his health is not off the table; he has non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which killed Paul Tsongas. Does Huckleberry Fred, as Roger Ailes calls him, really have the indolent form (slow, incurable - sounds like a Republican)?

John McCain used to be the list. He kissed so much Bush ass, though, that even his vaunted appeal to moderates (mostly because they haven't paid attention) has a carbuncle on it. If I were attacking McCain, I'd go right after his undeserved reputation as a straight shooter.

Mike Huckabee is trying to get enough oxygen to be the dark horse. The press is playing along because the field is otherwise so lame.

All the other guys and Huckabee, too, are running for some other office than President. VP? Long shots don't win Republican Presidential nominations.

Maybe they're just pimping their favorite issues. Tancredo is running for president of the militia movement, but he's neck and neck with Hunter. Brownback is probably trying to abort Rudi. Ron Paul strokes the GOP pretense of libertarianism. Maybe they're all just there for the nasty puns I could make on their names.

Or maybe they just needed to get out on the road for a little campaign sex.