Romney's 'War of Obamian Aggression'

Whenever I hear Romney memorably sputter more of his counterfeit indignation or calculated malice--for example Obama should take his "division and anger and hate back to Chicago"--I think of other great rallying cries that were just as indignant, just as malicious, just as cold-blooded and disingenuous and diversionary, such as Old Southerners' whoops about the "War of Northern Aggression," or Europe's brownshirted little men who fumed about having been "Stabbed in the Back."

At their deepest level, such cries are the counterintuitive cries of refinement, cultivation and sophistication by brutes, bullies and barbarians. But not primitives. Primitives would be at an innocent loss if asked or inspired to twist the plainly absurd into the elaborately marketable, while expert brutes and bullies have been around the block--they know, they've studied, what their fellow and lesser barbarians might eagerly swallow.

They also drip with projection, or, in the vernacular, simple table-turning. After landing the first martial blow, Southerners girded for the "aggressive" North; after supposedly being "stabbed in the back" by domestic socialists and Jewish financiers, the little men betrayed everyone and drove a dagger into Germany's heart; and when Romney envisions "what an angry and desperate presidency looks like," we know what he means.

The Obama campaign reacted to Romney's latest neoconfederate Teutonism with the aptest of descriptions: "unhinged." For one can be refined, one can be cultivated, one can even spring from the very apex of worldly sophistication as one also teeters on the precipice of malicious incoherence and criminal insanity.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting a Romney administration would reauthorize human auction blocks or, as many a right-wing paranoid has charged the Obama administration with plotting, construct concentration camps. In Romney & Co. there exists, however, a dispositional similarity to those who did that is simply undeniable. We are still waiting for some monstrous line that Romney won't slither across, some verbal abomination to which Romney won't avidly stoop, some flicker of humanity from this deeply pious man. Still waiting.

Comments

[japa21]

Don't waste your time. There is no line he won't cross or keep his surrogates from crossing. Up to, and possibly including, using the N word. Actually, he won't use that word. But if some other Republican spokesman (and I include people like Limbaugh in that crowd) did use it and he was challenged on it, he would say something like, "Those aren't the words I would use."

[Robert Lipscomb]

While I do not disagree with any of your points, you are focused on the lesser conflict. The real war of aggression is the Republican Civil War.

I concluded a few years back that the corporatist wing of the GOP would dedicate this election cycle to taking control of the party, with defeating Democrats as a secondary objective, and presumably the foreign policy neo-conservatives would be in alliance. I tuned into Rush Limbaugh this past January to learn that battle lines had been drawn between "conservative Repiublicans" and "establishment Republicans".

All weekend, I smelled a rat with the Ryan nomination. Increasingly, the Ryan selection looked less like a mistake by Romney and more like a hostile takeover by the "conservative Republicans".

Today on "Morning Joe", Joe Scarborough went nuclear via presentation of today's editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch) that declares war on "bed-wetting" Republicans who say they believe in smaller government and mouth that lie to its constituents, but who do not really believe in small government and vote big government in D.C. (as in P.M.'s "back-stabbing").

Scarborough (who is always presented as moderate of temperment) layered the WSJ editorial with his own vituperations. Specifically, he used Limbaugh's arsenal of concepts, such as "conservative Republicans" versus "establishment Republicans".

You see, culture wars and patriotism and racism were but foot soldiers in service of the real masters - Power and Greed. Further, Obama raised the stakes by expanding social services through Obamacare and his plan to balance the budget on the backs of the wealthy. Now, there is real money on the table and their side is losing. They will not leave it to the amateurs to general this war.

The so called bed-wetters know what the true believers will not accept. The war cannot be won. The Reagan democrats were for Reaganomics because they never believed that cutting government would cost them anything. precious few voters will vote to cut mMdicare and Social Security.

So, the bed-wetters are also fighting for their economic survival. They don't want to lose their jobs, nor do they want to serve in a permanent minority party.

There will be war.

[Peter G]

I am somewhat surprised that no one I have seen on the talking heads circuit has brought up the overtly racist assertion by Romney that his Anglo-saxon background made him uniquely qualified to restore the apparently damaged special relationship with Great Britain. That no one knew needed restoring.