Seriously, Republicans?

A little over a year ago, I wrote the following passage about Congressional Republicans, who were then shocking and scaring the nation by openly attempting to destroy Medicare:

…today’s Republican Party, enjoying a brief final majority in the House, knowing no limits, lacking frontal lobes, eyes ablaze, hair flying in the wind, leaning forward in the cockpit like a kamikaze pilot or racecar driver on angel dust, has put forward a budget that explicitly gets rid of Medicare…

The GOP in one of its final acts is committing a spectacular hara-kiri, throwing away one of its few remaining dependable voting blocs, in a feverish and fatal Danse Sacrale to its corporate overlords.

So, I think you can see my predicament.  If that over-the-top rhetoric was appropriate for conveying the mad self-destruction of 2011’s Republican Party – which it was – how then, O Muse, can I possibly do justice to 2012’s GOP, with its fervent jihad against college, women, and BIRTH CONTROL? All I can do is simply relate events as they occurred, and show them in video form.

Leap Year Lunacy

There must have been some sort of crazy energy buried inside what we will call the “Leap Year Cusp” of February 29 – March 1, 2012, which forced the Grand Old Party’s dementia to burst like a cyst and en-pus the entire nation.

After all, this was the two-day period when the Blunt Amendment came to a head, with every Republican Senator except Olympia Snowe boldly but vainly voting to allow employers to deny coverage for birth control (or anything else they feel like.)  I know, they have another way they like to present it – they’re somehow defending religious liberty – but this is a case where THEIR argument, not the Democrats’, is convoluted and lawyerly and any American can see what’s really up – the Republicans are fighting against their right to birth control.

And it’s not like Republican bigwigs – shameless two-faced libertines that most of them are – really have any scruples about contraception.  It’s just that they’ve made the political decision to ally themselves with an anti-contraception group right out of the third century AD – the Catholic hierarchy, that senile all-male coven of celibates and pedophiles who are blissfully ignored by 95% of their “flock” – in a shared attempt to hurt the Democrats by poking holes in Obamacare.

Of course, all of this made it necessary – in the same two-day period – for the undisputed head of the Grand Old Party – the fat deaf loathsome turd Rush Limbaugh – to repeatedly call brave Georgetown grad student  Sandra Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute,” and demand to see video of her having sex, for the temerity to testify before Congress on the medical necessity of The Pill.  Naturally Diamond already wrote two posts about this while I was busy getting my boots on, but the important thing isn’t Rush being Rush as he’s been for decades, but the fact that no Republican politician dares to challenge Rush’s gospel.  Said old-school bow-tied conservative Republican George Will this morning:

“Mr. Boehner comes out and says, Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using a salad fork for your entree, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff. I mean, and Rick Santorum says well, what he says was absurd, but an entertainer is allowed to be absurd. No. It is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right in its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses in their own side. [SIC – Ed. – See MoveOn, Betrayus, Sister Souljah, ad nauseam.] And it was depressing, because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

Welp… yep.  I hope Ms Fluke sues and gets a million from the fat deaf loathsome turd.  Forget boycotts and apologies, is there anywhere I can donate to make sure she sues him?

[Update:  Now I’m told he “apologized” today.  Fuck him.  This is nothing like Ed Shultz’ quick outburst last year, Rush did this gleefully for days in a row.  We must have hit his advertisers’ pocketbooks.  Fuck him, sue his ass.]

This was also the two-day period during which Breitbart finally exploded.  Are you trying to tell me you didn’t see that coming?

And what a hole Andrew will leave in our lives.  Now who will step in to ruin the careers of good people and bring down worthy altruistic organizations with deceptively edited videos?  Keep up the lawsuit, Shirley Sherrod, I’m sure there’s enough left over for both you and his family.

This same two-day period – the Leap Year Cusp of 2012 – was also, fittingly, the time that SLIGHTLY moderate Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe finally decided she couldn’t take any more and announced her resignation.  The times she’s stood on principle in recent memory could probably be counted on one hand, but take it easy on her – we know, from ex-Senator Chafee, the sort of punishment Senate Republican leadership exacts from the states of Senators who don’t toe the Party line.

This gives us an excellent chance to replace a nominally moderate Republican with a truly progressive Democrat in the form of Chellie Pingreeplease join me in urging her to jump into the race – time is of the essence here!  This is the lady that ran the great reformist group Common Cause for years before being elected as a Maine Congresswoman.

I think it was the SAME FREAKING DAY that the brilliant and distinguished old Vietnam vet and former longtime Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey announced that he’s running – that’s the Senate seat being abandoned by one of our worst Democrats, gigantic melon-headed corporatist Ben Nelson, and otherwise certain to be plucked up by some Rethug – but with the popular and respected Kerrey in the mix, maybe NOT!  And what an improvement to the Senate that would be, to go from useless waffling centrists Nelson and Snowe to fighting liberals Pingree and Kerrey – while ensuring the Vandals don’t take over the upper house.

Here, from the 80’s is newly elected Senator and decorated war hero Bob Kerrey singing an anti-war song.  [Hat-tip to Lawrence O’Donnell!]

Imagine a Senate with fighting progressives Elizabeth Warren, Chellie Pingree, Bob Kerrey, and whatever proud Connecticut liberal replaces the despicable Lieberman, joining Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, and Sherrod Brown.  Yes, the Senate will still be The House Where Things Go To Die, as we won’t have 60 to overcome the Permanent Republican Filibuster, but we’ll be that much closer to a great 2014 Senate!

Oh, and this was also the two-day period when the Republican Party’s Guiding Light on the Topic of Immigration – Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio – came out with his “Cold Case Posse” to confirm what we all suspected:  President Barack Obama is an impostor who was NOT born in this country, and crimes were probably committed in the creation of his phony birth certificate.  Big deal, you try to respond, Arpaio is a has-been buffoon.  Yeah, except … ALL the Republican Presidential candidates are vying for his endorsement!

This insistence on only the most punitive approach to immigration is one of the most awesomely self-piercing arrows in the Republican quiver!  Calbuzz, a left-leaning blog which, like myself, would like to see a responsible, grownup opposition Party for Democrats to work with, has scolded the GOP for years about getting with the pathway to citizenship, as America and particularly California grows inexorably more Latino.  Pero they just can’t do it.  The national GOP is hellbent to follow in the footsteps of California GOP – California in all things setting the trend – of stubborn, implacable SHRINKAGE.  Forget the Whigs – these fellas are angling for the status of the Locofocos, the Mugwumps, the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Masonic Party.

Of two minds as always, and despite reveling in the spectacle of my foes’ self-destruction, the grownup half of me doesn’t want the Republican Party to disappear.  I DON’T TRUST MY FELLOW DEMOCRATS THAT MUCH!   I don’t want us to turn into twentieth-century Mexico, when the corrupt centrist PRI ran everything for 70+ years with a couple of joke parties to the sides.  We need you bastards to keep us honest, and restrain us from our sometimes over-generous impulses!

Calbuzz documents the woeful search for a Republican of ANY stature who could conceivably go up against DiFi this year or Jerry Brown next year.  There’s just nobody.  Some hopeful eyes look, far down the stretch, at charismatic and allegedly moderate, definitively military and surfing, young Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, who’s now running for San Diego Mayor.  Wait – an alleged moderate that my FOX News-watching brother and sister both like?  I think I will have to find out more about this fellow, San Diego’s not that far afield for us…


About Vern Nelson

Greatest pianist/composer in Orange County, and official political troubadour of Anaheim and most other OC towns. Regularly makes solo performances, sometimes with his savage-jazz band The Vern Nelson Problem. Reach at vernpnelson@gmail.com, or 714-235-VERN.