Note to GOP.
This guy:
Is going to inspire about as much confidence as these guys:
Actually, that’s not fair to any of the fine Americans listed above (why would I want to disgrace Mr. Rogers, Doug Henning or Barney Fife? They are all wonderful, if slightly squishy gentlemen). Indeed, those comparisons would only apply to Jindal’s presentation, where he distinguished himself last evening as a feckless lightweight. Those forced smiles and awkward “aw shucks” mannerisms only apply superficial and hurriedly applied make-up to cover the typically mean-spirited policies these obstreperous right-wingers are currently clinging to. Don’t believe me, listen to their own cheerleaders: David Brooks here, and a handful of others, here. To appreciate how rudderless these buffoons are (never forget this drown-government-in-a-bathtub asshole, who along with Dick “Deficits Don’t Matter” Cheney and Phil “Nation of whiners” Gramm, comprises the unholy trinity of ideological twits whose Ayn Rand meets Marie Antoinette political calculating more or less spawned the mess we’re in), consider the naked cynicism required to send Jindal out there in the first place. As David Letterman put it best during one of the initial Republican debates, in 2007, “I mean, they looked like guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club!”
Now, suddenly Jindal is the go-to guy and Michael “Hip Hop” Steele is the new RNC Chair. What a coincidence! Someone needs to explain to this (good old) boys’ club that propping up two ostensibly diverse representatives in typically cartoonish, reactionary fashion is insulting on at least two levels. For one, it’s offensive in its blatant pandering (not to mention its lame approximation of Obama’s genuine appeal). Second, and much more importantly, you can’t, uh, put lipstick on a pig. You can present the most ethnically and culturally inclusive spokespersons any second-rate focus group could conjure up, but if they are echoing the same stale (and racist) platitudes, they are ultimately just mannequins mouthing what this guy and his ilk hold near and dear. It’s the same old song and dance: these hypocrites sat on their hands while the last administration threw common sense and fiscal restraint to the wind, and now, naturally, they are appalled at the debt we are crippling our grand kids with. No alarms were sounded when the size of government (enough pork to satiate a hundred Homer Simpsons) ballooned to the size of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, but now, obviously, we’ve been hijacked by a Socialist state. As soon as government moves to actually help people, it becomes toxic. That is how cretinous the GOP has become. To which I say, Give me a break, and super-size it. Unfortunately for these assholes, the crisis they’ve created is a moment made for government, and they did nothing to stop it from happening. Their credibility is always at the opposite pole of their shamelessness. None of this is new, of course, but only now (sigh) when average Americans (even the ones in red states!) are feeling the pinch of reckless republican policy, are the scales dropping from their irate eyes. Many folks are finally figuring out that they bent over for the proverbial soap quite a while ago and that pain isn’t going away without a change of perspective.
Fortunately, Obama continues to illustrate that he’s the right person at the right time: his speech last night was a masterful stroke on several levels. Politically, he is speaking intelligently, like an adult, to a nation of people who want to be spoken to as adults. Strategically, he’s garnering a groundswell of support to enact these (necessary) policies. The more the idiot wind blows from the deflating GOP tent, the less people they will be able to convince going forward. If they don’t care about those without jobs or health care now, how much more clear can it be that the only thing they really care about is this. And the less of it people who need it have, the happier they seem to be. Don’t believe me, believe them. We are now officially on the see-saw, it would seem, and because of their own obstruction and obstinancy, the higher Obama goes, the lower they will sink. And they have no one, as usual, to blame but themselves.
I can’t believe it, and never thought I could ever imagine saying this, but it may have played better to have this person deliver the response last night:
