Imaginary Horserace, 2012 Edition
So, the 2012 United States Presidental Election is effectively between Barack Obama and Willard “Mitt” Romney. I don’t think I can stress how little this registers on my “give-a-fuck-o-meter”, although I have been inundated by dire prognostications regarding the end of our “American Way of Life ™” (whatever that is) and a lot of scare-tactic advertising campaigns unleashed by the virtually unlimited flow of corporate money (or as Constitutional Originalist fuckwads like Antonin Scalia would say, “free speech”) into the current election cycle.
The problem is, there isn’t really a horse race to be had. When FiveThirtyEight is pushing a 70 percent chance of a fairly popular incumbent president retaining a seat, one could wonder how the news media cycle could possibly make anything of it. As of this weekend, the Budgetary Wunderkind Paul Ryan has joined Mitt Romney’s unexciting ticket — and it doesn’t make any damn difference. Mittens ain’t winning this election, folks. We can show as many “real ‘muricans” as we can cram on the television, spitting opinions out of both sides of their figurative asses, but it’s not going to affect the outcome of this election. Well, unless the entire point of this chest-beating is going to be making a Mitt Romney victory seem plausible enough so that, if the need arises, disenfranchising voters can be made to seem to more naturally produce a victory for a statistical underdog. You know, if I were into conspiracy theories.
As far as policies go, I don’t agree with any of the Republican candidates’ policies. That’s my general disclosure: I don’t believe dry humping stacks of Atlas Shrugged is going to magically cure the economy, and I don’t believe that dropping government involvement in economics and allowing self regulation will somehow stimulate anything other than the same massive greed and theft we’ve seen already. However, for the most part, both parties are pretty closely aligned on most of the substantial issues.
Both parties are going to continue stacking bodies in other countries in wars we don’t belong in, and are going to continue funding the military at bank-busting levels.
Both parties are going to eschew any audit of the Federal Reserve (yeah, yeah, I know, Ron Paul and I coincide on something — even a broken crackpot is right once a day) or any prosecution of the fuckers who blew up the global economy for their own person gain. (If you don’t believe me on that one, check out Bill Black’s take on it. They’ve done bad, criminally prosecutable things. Obama won’t prosecute because he’s scared that he’ll appear to be discouraging “business”, and Mittens won’t touch them because his business ethics and interests are pretty closely aligned with those jackals.)
Both parties are going to continue pushing “tax cuts” as economic stimulus. They aren’t, at least not *lasting* economic stimulus. If we gave a shit about decreasing unemployment or “job creation”, we would be pushing another WPA, not giving handjobs to banksters.
Both parties will get rid of Medicare and Social Security. They may not talk about it, but both are going to do it, eventually. Simpson-Bowles was commissioned by the *Obama* administration, and Mittens has made the Paul Ryan budgetary plan of voucher-izing (read: privatizing) Social Security and Medicare a major plank of his campaign. Apparently, “very serious” people want you to fucking do everything on your own, because they don’t believe you’re anything but a Randian moocher….
All they have for differences, at least in the running of their campaigns, are wedge issues. One supports abortion rights, another doesn’t. One is into allowing religious exemptions to health coverage, another isn’t. One is into the DREAM Act, one has a “nuanced” position (or whatever he’s decided his position is today — I don’t think the polls from “real ‘muricans” have come in yet today).
We’re getting the Status Quo, folks. We never had a damn chance, either; both establishment parties are owned by the same basic money sources, and you’d better believe that they’re getting their money’s worth.
Before anyone accuses me of leaving out Senator Ron Paul: he’s a fucking crank. Libertarianism is a fucking crank “philosophy”, and his bullshit disregard for other people, in the guise of individualism, is going to hurt more people than it helps. Government isn’t the only coercive force, people. More importantly, if you’re fine with state government but hate the federal government — we tried that “exceptionally limited Federal Government” thing with the Articles of Confederation. It failed pretty spectacularly, so stop asking for a do-over, please.
The current paradigm, being pushed by the so-called “right” and “centrist right”, is that people don’t deserve anything other than what they “earn”. It’s an interesting wet-dream, which pays homage to the fraudulent concept of the meritocracy. If you’ve been paying attention for the last 20 years, we don’t have a meritocracy. Those who do well by others and play by the rules do *not* finish first, but those willing to loot, pillage, and burn — they are our new *Gods*. We deify CEOs, in the vain hope that we, too, may ascend to the Olympian summits with them, to enjoy the fruits of our Job Creator mojo. Honestly, I’m not sure whether the people pushing this fanticrap (a mixture of fantasy and crap, for the uninitiated) believe it, making them fools, or are using it to get ahead, making them scoundrels; regardless, if you hear someone trying to spread this particular Gospel of Supply Side Economics, try to make sure they end up on the outer side of your front door.