One swallow does not make a summer and when it comes to Romney's big gulp of Paul Ryan as VP it may be this bird has flown even before it had a chance to alight. The Village has always liked Ryan so they have been pleased to pretend this doll eyed dolt was an intellectual visionary and a powerhouse wonk rather than a petulant stumble mouthed poser whose budget numbers don't add up. And no doubt many pundits who crave a horse-race narrative to sleepwalk through will spend a week or so pretending this pick gives them back their horse-race. But the simple fact is that the rabidly anti-choice Ryan won't help Romney with women, this white bread mayonnaise sandwich won't help Romney with Latinos, this Medicare couponizer whose budget lards bazillionaires with tax cuts paid for with cuts from programs that benefit everybody else won't help Romney shake his lethal Richy Rich image, and he will be revealed soon enough as incapable of whomping up the Base like La Palin did because he's just smart enough to alienate them without being nearly smart enough to be... well, actually smart. It's likely that Romney's Randroid Ryan Hail Mary will be heralded as political malpractice by the time what looks to be a crazytown GOP convention carnival comes to town, and I for one can't see much but downside for Romney and upside for Dems.
It is obvious that Romney came out of the primary contest a winner so wounded he was a loser. The Obama campaign defined him very early as he stumbled bloodied and bruised from that scrum and stole his Romney's "business experience" narrative by exposing the shit stink of his business dealings and secretive tax dodging. And the Ryan pick was a clear desperation pick to change the story and seal the deal with the GOP crazytown base still skeptical after the primary, a pick which takes away the solid winner gambit of a referendum election in bad economic times and makes the election instead a highly risky loser gambit of a choice election between crony capitalism in libertopian drag (which is highly unpopular) and a social compact that supplements enterprise with social security (which is highly popular).
If there is an upside, it goes to Karl Rove, who had almost certainly given up 2012 as a lost cause when he saw the clown show primary take shape and decided to make a second bid at transforming the GOP through Crossroads and a pivot to Latinos and compassionate conservatism in the aftermath of the demographic evaporation of the Southern Strategy and anti-gay vitriol as a sufficient working class diversion to enable plutocratic prevalence. Now when Romney loses (and it pays to remember that everybody in the GOP hates Romney and won't exactly be shedding tears on his behalf when he delivers his stiff concession speech) Rovian players will attribute the loss to the Teahadis and make a bid for a re-alignment on their terms.
Of course, it remains to be seen if their case will prevail and whether, in prevailing, they are in any kind of position to build a GOP brand that isn't still driven by the desperate remnant of white-racist patriarchal pricks and greedheads in a rapidly secularizing diversifying nation coming to grips with the failure of neoliberal ideology and a catastrophic harvest of greenhouse storms. Still, there is no doubt that Ryan is less likely to represent a re-set button that will answer Romney's ambitions than a re-set button that answer Rove's.
It is obvious that Romney came out of the primary contest a winner so wounded he was a loser. The Obama campaign defined him very early as he stumbled bloodied and bruised from that scrum and stole his Romney's "business experience" narrative by exposing the shit stink of his business dealings and secretive tax dodging. And the Ryan pick was a clear desperation pick to change the story and seal the deal with the GOP crazytown base still skeptical after the primary, a pick which takes away the solid winner gambit of a referendum election in bad economic times and makes the election instead a highly risky loser gambit of a choice election between crony capitalism in libertopian drag (which is highly unpopular) and a social compact that supplements enterprise with social security (which is highly popular).
If there is an upside, it goes to Karl Rove, who had almost certainly given up 2012 as a lost cause when he saw the clown show primary take shape and decided to make a second bid at transforming the GOP through Crossroads and a pivot to Latinos and compassionate conservatism in the aftermath of the demographic evaporation of the Southern Strategy and anti-gay vitriol as a sufficient working class diversion to enable plutocratic prevalence. Now when Romney loses (and it pays to remember that everybody in the GOP hates Romney and won't exactly be shedding tears on his behalf when he delivers his stiff concession speech) Rovian players will attribute the loss to the Teahadis and make a bid for a re-alignment on their terms.
Of course, it remains to be seen if their case will prevail and whether, in prevailing, they are in any kind of position to build a GOP brand that isn't still driven by the desperate remnant of white-racist patriarchal pricks and greedheads in a rapidly secularizing diversifying nation coming to grips with the failure of neoliberal ideology and a catastrophic harvest of greenhouse storms. Still, there is no doubt that Ryan is less likely to represent a re-set button that will answer Romney's ambitions than a re-set button that answer Rove's.
2 comments:
Try to understand this simple fact friend: NO SANE PERSON GIVES AWAY THEIR POWER! That's a liberal mental illness found mostly among complacent, comfortable, well-conditioned white sheeple. Until leftists can find less bankrupt arguments than "We're coming for you straight white man, we're demographically disempowering you and taking over", America will continue to be in a state of escalating civil war. This is also why so many millions who might otherwise be attracted to liberalism can *never* support your side. Viscerally, they know that their demographic is under attack at every level and have no choice but to fight back. My response to these relentless attacks is simple and perfectly rational: Give me MORE POWER! MORE POWER! MORE POWER!
Study your history: your ideology is TOTALLY DELUSIONAL AND UNPROVEN! It is an invented, artificial social order which your kind are trying to impose upon the Western world, with predictable results. The sword of Islam is coming for you and for the West, your societies are disintigrating into warring ethnic factions, and your only response is to attack white Christian men? Wake the fuck up, or fuck off!
Look around: We live in late Rome, an age of total dissolution, decadence and collapse. As you yourself have noted, our progressive mythology is utterly bankrupt. America is terminally infected with an incredibly shallow liberalism, and when we go all of Western civilization falls. Then comes a Dark Age, an Age of Steel when people will look back on your kind with utter contempt that such weakness and decadence was allowed to spread like a cancer and destroy the most powerful civilization in history in such short order.
Your kind have much to answer for, and little time to do it, leftist college professor man. Good luck in the new Dark Age -- you're going to need it!
Look, in your everyday dealings it is highly unlikely that you live in a way consonant with what you are claiming to believe so ardently. People solicit the agreement or changed conduct of others all the time. People compromise, people change their minds, people discover unexpected allies, people find common ground in shared endeavors while at once differing in others. Power in its political sense refers to these dynamics and to the strategies we deploy in the face of stakeholder diversity to solve shared problems and accomplish shared ends. Power isn't something you shore up like a caveman piling up poop in a corner of the cave or a warrior piling up skulls in a castle or a corporate raider piling up dollars in a vault. Learning to live with others isn't asking you to "give up power" it is a matter of opening up to available possibilities of becoming powerful enough in alliance with actually existing others to solve actually existing problems that beset you in the world and enjoy actually-available occasions for expression and change in the world.
In the picture accompanying this analysis imagining the Obama team laughing at the strategic ineptitude of this VP pic that slots so perfectly into their preferred campaign narrative there are white Christian men as far as know. I speak of the palpable reality of a diversifying and secularizing America, in which white Christian guys are obviously as much a part as other people are. If that is experienced by you as an attack it is reality that is attacking you and you should possibly take that under advisement before you start howling about the delusions and unprovable assertions of others. Not every straight guy is a patriarchal prick, you know, not every Christian is itching for a Pentecostal theocracy, you know, not every white guy is a racist asshole. There, there, little boy, you will discover soon enough that to be part of the diversity in a multicultural world is not such a bad thing and that you are wrong to pretend that you have "no choice" but to fight for your infantile fantasy that you are the God of the Mountain when you are really another citizen-stakeholder with the same rights and responsibilities as everybody else, no more, no less.
By the way, you do realize that there are over one and a half billion Muslims on earth and something like two and a half million in America? Do you really think it makes any kind of sense to reduce all that diversity of human beings to the image of a "sword" presumably aimed at your heart? For somebody boasting about manly strength you sure sound scared. Do you know any non-christian people? I know lots and lots and lots. We are all more similar than we are different. I daresay that includes you and me, too, once you chill out a bit and unclench.
You talk a lot about "my kind," whatever that is supposed to mean -- a middle aged white guy with a longtime partner and a cat who works for a living as a teacher and writer. Can you really think I'm a different species from you just because I'm more interested in taking seriously the way people reconcile differences to facilitate the solving of shared problems than pissing in my diaper and barking like a big bully all the time like you seem to want to do? How small and scared you sound. Surely there is more to you than this?
You seem to think you have a lot of big ideas about Rome and a clash of civilizations and historical forces and cultural struggles and human psychology -- and strictly speaking it is hard to square this sort of respect for knowledge with your contempt of my education and my chosen vocation teaching in a university. Unfortunately for you, I do know quite enough history to know who historically are the sorts of people who talk like you do.
How interesting it is that the corporate empty-suit Romney's choice in Paul Ryan of a zealot devoted to a self-contradictory anti-government anti-choice stance is bringing you out of the cracks in the floorboards to howl for blood.
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