The Tattlesnake – Yankee Doodle Kydoodles and Other Yowling Yowfs of the Teabaggers Pox Americana Edition

"What then is freedom madness? God forbid. For freedom and madness exist not together."
-- Epictetus, "Golden Sayings," No. XXIX

Non-corporate dissectors of the political scene, and Board Certified (in the Rand Paul sense) observers such as myself, have learned to read the stray tea leaves crushed beneath the corporately-financed circus wagon of this year's New, Improved Tidal Wave GOP ("Democracy's Detergent!") and the occasional bits of actual useful information that drop off the Big Media buffet table of parboiled conventional-wisdom offal determined fit for the rustics by the over-paid 'two legs good, two legs with money great' crew that pounds a dismal beat between Beltway Washington and the glass canyons of New York.

A pattern has emerged as clear as the unblinking eyes of Karl Rove when he's lying through his teeth; despite the noises made by national pollsters -- whose questionable practices include antiquated techniques from the 'one ringy-dingy' age of rotary-dial Bakelite phones, and a habitual penchant for loading poll questions with such baloney as, "If you had to vote for a really fantastic Republican candidate or a Democrat who nightly dines on dogs and cats, which would you prefer?" or "Yes, I know it's the headquarters of Koch Industries; I wondered how you planned to vote this election?"-- it's now plain internal polling done by the GOP has revealed that their bumble-brained Teabagger candidates are losing far and wide, and by more drastic margins than the MSM Silly Swillers of Echo Valley would have us believe. Hence, nearly a week before the actual election, we have Republican charges of 'vote fraud' and the vow that voter intimi – er – 'integrity' squads will be dispatched to those areas rife with denizens who made the poor choice to be born with skin darker than Sarah Palin's and, unlike politely accommodating indigent whites in certain parts of the country, insist on voting against those who would gladly serve them up by the shovel to feudalistic Chinese-style capitalism.

Your Tattler could not avoid sketching out what these Teabagger 'voter integrity squads' might look like. Will they be in full 18th century drag from tricorn hat to knee-britches with silk stockings and ask questions of voters in the formal English of two centuries past? "Hark thee, fair citizen! Dost thou possess the required credentials to participate in this seemly exercise of democracy?" If so, I dost predicteth a spate of hilarity as laughing voters push by the costumed lunkheads, most probably thinking they are hawking the opening of a new Long John Silver's rather than checking voter identification.

Of course, Ohio's Republican House contender Rich Iott may dispatch his Nazi re-enactors to prevent any chicanery at the polls. Will they be dressed in complete SS regalia and posing their queries in a fake German accent, ala Col. Klink? "I must zee your papers now, schweinhundt!" This, too, affords too much room for risible ridiculousness, if not danger for the Nazi imposters – some unamused WWII vet might grab a rifle and take potshots at them from his wheelchair or walker.

But then, the Teabaggery may appear in yellow t-shirts with the affable "Don't Tread on Me" embossed in acrylic on the front, accompanied by a gun strapped to their leg in one of those goofy Velcro thigh holsters. Sure, they seem to mean business, but the thigh-holster can be a knotty problem – if the straps are too loose, the pistol humiliatingly falls down on your foot and resembles nothing so much as a public depantsing; if the straps are too tight, it cuts off blood flow and the Teabagger tough guy is reduced to hopping around on one foot, trying to intimidate minority voters while restoring circulation to his numb leg. "Hey – Ow! Ow! – you got legal identification to vote – Ow! Ow! – here?" That path, too, leads to nothing other than comical YouTube videos and an excuse for some droll Jon Stewart barbs on The Daily Show.

But no matter what garb the Teabaggers don -- whether it's grim 'Men in Black' mufti like Joe Miller's amateur-hour security guards in Alaska, or the simpler straw hat with hanging teabags stapled around the brim – the fact is that most Teabaggers hail from rural, caucasian areas of the country. While they are confident they intimately know the psyche of black people from long exposure to lawn ornamentation and Bill Cosby reruns, and no doubt believe they will be greeted in Inner City regions by courteous men and women emulating our gracious president, such may not be the case. I can think of several black folks of my acquaintance who would not take kindly to being confronted by some rude peckerwood demanding their papers. They would definitely not refrain from putting the 'Mr. T' in Tea Party, so to speak.

What's more, if Hispanics are the vicious beheading drug gangsters the trembling Teabaggers have been told they are, how many of Beck's Crusaders will want to hang around in front of polling places in Latino neighborhoods, waiting for the Machete of Death to fall? These Tea Partiers are, after all, gullible ante-bellum conservatives who are scared of almost everything, including any concept hatched after the Dark Ages, and unlikely to chance confronting the living representations of the actors Sharron Angle sticks in her Halloween Party TV ads.

There will be intimidation at the polls -- the Teabaggers will be terrified into sitting in their vans with the doors locked, hunched down, trying not to wet themselves. This GOP 'project' will be as big a bust as Rove's electoral math in 2006.

Add to that the number of voters who find criminally stomping on a passive woman's head at a public event offensive, and you have an upset for the Democrats in the making, and the Teabaggers quickly jettisoned from the GOP ranks damned with the only epithet the cynical Republican elite consistently honors, 'loser'.

Contrary to the news-cycle fantasies of Media Conventional Wisdom to which would-be president Rudy Giuliani succumbed, mostly a confection of giddy press releases, past performance, and inbred cocktail party jabber, the fanatical Teabagger GOP – a small minority never much more than empty rage, incoherent ideas, and shifting wind, financed by fools with more money than brains -- peaked months ago and has been in decline ever since as Democratic candidates rose in even the archaic landline-phone polls that favor older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative voters – in other words, the core of the Tea Party movement. If the Punditocracy that has for the past year woven the fiction of massive GOP gains in 2010 were not so obstinate in supporting their own discredited imaginings, and getting a pat on the head from the large corporations that dispense their paychecks, they might look at this information from a different angle, and I don't mean Sharron: Around the country, the Democrats have pulled even or ahead with the voters the desiccated, weakened GOP desperately needs to get elected.

Hang down your bulbous Chuck Schulz head, Charlie Cook.

Sure, it's possible that Dems will stay home in droves to teach Obama some kind of obscure lesson, which is reminiscent of the story about the boy who chopped off half his foot with an axe for attention. He got the attention he craved – his family thought he was nuts and stuck him in a mental hospital, and he had to live out his life limping around with half his foot missing. And disgusted independent voters might decide to commit economic suicide by entrusting their futures to babbling goofballs like Angle and Rand Paul, and corporate vipers like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and complete the job of obliterating our Constitution, rewarding the rich at the expense of the rest of us, eliminating social programs, and shipping what's left of our jobs overseas or forcing us to work for slave wages.

Then, I'll hang down my head, but I won't be alone – millions of Americans, in a few years, will feel the full impact of Reverse Robin Hood Republicanism and be doing the same, and what's left of America will depend on the thin thread of ink flowing from the president's veto pen.

If it comes to that point, you'd better hope Obama doesn't hold a grudge and decide to teach the country a lesson.

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

Kydoodle: To make loud, meaningless noise.
(From the book "Words" by Paul Dickson.)

Yowf: One whose importance exceeds [their] merit. Rich or influential fools. (Coined by Gelet Burgess who also invented the words 'blurb' and 'bromide.')

The Tattlesnake – Post-Election Portents and Predictions Edition

…And How the Big Media Speculators Got It Wrong Again

The usual Big Media Punchinellos were out in force the past few days, blaring and bleating the Beltway Conventional Wisdom that the Democratic Party's loss of the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey are a sure referendum on Obama Administration policies. This is the sort of doomed facile reasoning found in the bottom of a Washington cocktail glass typical of Our Pundit Class who, from non-existent Iraq WMD to Fred Thompson's popularity with voters, can never seem to fit the square peg in the round hole, pound though they might.

A brief review of the Dem candidates in VA and NJ clearly shows why progressives and like-minded independents didn't bother to vote for Creigh Deeds in Virginia or Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and it had nothing to do with Obama. For various reasons explained below, they were both terrible candidates.

Creigh Deeds: In an era of change, Deeds was a shambling throwback, a dismal campaign clunker with four flat tires, who rejected Obama's advice and help until it dawned on him in the final weeks he was going to lose in a landslide. He ran a miserably negative campaign, devoid of ideas, and presented his pap on toast so dry even peppy Dem loyalists fought to stay awake during his speeches. A Dem Blue Dog so blue he threatened to opt out of a public option should it become available to Virginians, he was nearly as conservative as his GOP opponent Bob McDonnell. Why leave the house to vote when the choice is between a Republican and a Dem who thinks like a Republican? Seen clearly, this was a referendum, and portent of the future, for Blue Dog Dems rather than President Obama.

Jon Corzine: The one-time US Senator who was just bounced from the governor's mansion is a Goldman Sachs Golden Boy who made piles of money on Wall Street and insists on spending it on vanity campaigns. Why he doesn't just buy a new summer home or sumptuous overpriced yacht instead of squadering his fortune to impose himself on our political process is beyond me, but Corzine has never shown much talent for governing once elected, and what few things he has accomplished were always moderate to the point of invisibility. Jon is the kind of drab Dudley Do-Nothing the Democratic Party needs to send packing, if they expect to keep the majority in the future. Again, the portentiousness of Corzine's defeat was not his affiliation with Obama's policies, but the yellow line up the middle of his back from avoiding tenaciously either the right or left lane. He will not be missed, at least by this writer.

The point? Neither of them were progressives and didn't stir independents or liberal Dems to go out and vote for them.

And now to stare into the crystal – but not Kristol – ball for some predictions on the Republican winners of those two elections:

Bob McDonnell: The Republican who just won the governor's race in Virginia is a graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University and has been steeped in Christopublican politics his entire adult life. McDonnell campaigned on a Chuck-E-Cheesy slogan of "Bob's 4 Jobs" but when Virginians discover Bob's secret plan to create jobs is to pray twice a day, they'll be anxious to dump him in the next election. Either that or, Ted Haggard clone that he is, he'll get caught up in some lurid sex scandal, perhaps involving farm animals – male farm animals, of course, in a stall in the Minneapolis airport. "Hey, how did you sneak that horse in here?!"

Chris Christie: The GOP candidate who swept Corzine from the New Jersey governor's mansion was once a NJ federal prosecutor, appointed by the Bush/Rove locus of governmental crime. While in that job he had been repeatedly tied to corruption and malfeasance, including handing out no-bid contracts to friends, using his office to help his brother's shaky Wall Street firm, connections to a Genovese Family crime boss (Tino "The Greek" Fiumara), and he was censured for refusing to prosecute Bristol-Myers-Squibb for criminal fraud, instead letting them pay a $311,000 fine and donate $5 million to his alma mater, Seton Hall University School of Law. (Considering the billions B-M-S makes, the fine and donation were a slap on the wrist.) And keep in mind it's New Jersey, next to Texas the most corrupt state in the union, and this guy has been a major player in the Bush mold -- it's only a matter of time before he sells some indulgence, takes a bribe, or springs some crook and then he's on his way out the door. The only thing you can say for Christie is that he was smart enough to refuse Sarah Palin's offer to campaign for him.

Meanwhile, the real action was in New York's 23rd Congressional District, the most reliably conservative and Republican in the state. Even after GOP bigwigs like Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Dick Armey, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck sang his praises, Conservative Party candidate Doug "The Bullet's in My Top Pocket" Hoffman was defeated by liberal Democrat and union-supporter Bill Owens. The Republican civil war has started in earnest and I think when the Christopublican-Teabagger wing of the GOP nominates Palin in 2012, that will be it -- many Republicans will pull out and vote Libertarian or nominate their own candidate, someone like Colin Powell. When Palin is beaten by the largest landslide in American history, bringing many other Republicans down with her, the GOP will be no more, just as the Whigs became extinct when Lincoln was elected in 1860. I don't know what will replace the GOP, but I'll bet it won't have 'Republican' in the name.

If you're looking for a bellwether of future elections and the direction the country's heading, this upstate New York congressional election presents a far better portent than do the elections in Virginia and New Jersey, but you'd never know that from watching our puerile Punditocracy diddle itself dizzy on nationwide television.

Contact the author at editor@ltsaloon.org

© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.