Ron Paul is so full of self-righteously reactionary b.s. it's sickening, until one watches him gut and fillet one of his opponents with it, which he just did to the even more self-righteous Rick Santorum.
***
In the GOP it has come to this: Santorum defending his earmarks, the state-interested distribution of which is a senator's job.
***
Santorum says he opposed the Wall Street bailout "on principle" because he preferred the markets to work. The markets were working -- we were in near-complete financial meltdown. Without the bailout we would have melted to irreversible doom. The entire point of the bailout was to stop the markets from doing the prodigious harm they were doing to every working-class American. Is that so hard to understand and accept?
***
It's easy for us Americans to feel our cultural superiority over, say, the primitive barbarity of Afghans, who riot and murder over "insults" to inanimate iconography. Yet that feeling becomes a bit elusive when we watch the likes of presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who not only believes in the real and physical presence of a Hellish bogeyman, but because of that is by God the front-runner in one of our two major parties.
What happened? Did the entire world climb into a rickety time machine and set course for the 13th century? And if so, why do I still get cable? How is it that I just watched Santorum, who is miles and miles away at the Arizona State Monastery, defend a belief system in a Scholastically evasive and Sophistic way that makes Augustine of Hippo look like Timothy Leary?
***
Oh dear, they've been reduced to a violent spat over ... Arlen Specter.
***
You know, Newt just might slip through all this bickering and come out ahead in Michigan. Not out front, just farther ahead than expected. Because Mitt and Rick are coming across as petty squabblers, and the GOP base likes monstrously cyclopean squabblers.
***
There goes Mitt again: promising to slash taxes, vastly increase defense spending, and cap and balance the budget. The old scams just never get too old for this tiresome bunch.
***
Romney asserts point blank that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, "it will be used." What epistemological foundation does he have for that assertion? None. Absolutely none. Yet he calls Obama irresponsible. It's really quite breathtaking.
***
If any of these three -- i.e., excluding Paul -- were to be elected president, we'd be looking at WWIII. What epistemological foundation do I have for that assertion? I'm looking at it, I'm listening to it. These clowns are horrifying.
***
And that's a wrap.
This is dangerous work. It's pushing the limits of my assorted, recovering chemical dependencies.
Obama wins again
Posted by: ronalda | February 22, 2012 at 09:51 PM
I'm truly grateful that you and a few other hardy souls have braved the debate wars and are sending reports from the front. Sheer heroism!
Myself, I'm a conscientious objector. It's not the blood or even the mud. It's the crud.
Posted by: tamiasmin | February 23, 2012 at 02:02 AM
GOP continues it's race to the bottom.
Now we will see if there's a sub-basement?
Betting there is.
My parents- life long Republicans who kicked me out of the house for supporting George Mc Govern and stopped talking to me over W, are now self-identifying as Independents... hilarious!
Posted by: Susan Zoon | February 23, 2012 at 08:08 AM
It is false that the bank bailouts were imperative. The specter of a "second great depression" if we had not bailed out Wall Street is a fairy tale invented by the bank lobby. The only economic fact that would have been different is that the Wall Street crew would have lost claims to hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy's output each year and trillions of dollars of wealth. That money would instead have been available for the rest of society. Instead, we have Wall Street telling us that we should be thankful that we didn't have a second Great Depression. We don't have to believe their lies.
Posted by: tyler | February 28, 2012 at 10:28 AM