Republicans continuing to search for a Messiah

Actually, let me exchange the word “search” for the more colorful and accurate “scrounge”.
The Republicans are scrounging around for anyone who can lead their party to the Presidency next year.
It ought to be easy to unseat a President who has been as big a failure as Obama.
Elected as a tonic to Bush and his wars, Obama has failed to accomplish anything of value.
His health care plan will effectively eliminate millions of American small businesses, and make it impossible to start new small businesses. His reform of banking was simply a huge give-away to the banks. Ditto for his stock market reform. And he hasn’t ended the wars, he has expanded them. He has failed to deliver on all of his promises.
In spite of this miserable record, the Republicans can’t get their act together. Each frontrunner is more ridiculous, more comical, more unelectable than the last.
The real problem is not the candidates, it’s the rickety platform they must stand on.
If you are a Republican candidate, there are a few very important things you must “own” – whether you actually believe in them or not:
One of these is that the very rich must never be asked to pay more taxes. The Republican Party would prefer to make every single working person in the country pay $30 a week more than add a 2% tax on those making $1,000,000 or more in taxable income. That’s gotta be a hard sell with the average hardworking conservative guy who carries a lunch bucket to work.
Another plank they must support is that we ought to go to war against Iran. Most people know that as soon as the Straits of Hormuz are closed by a war, gas will be $12 a gallon at the pump, and electric bills will triple. Not too many people are afraid that Iran will ever be stupid enough to launch a nuke at the United States. And most of us remember that the very same people who said Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction are now saying the same thing about Iran. They were wrong that time, and many good Americans died as a result.
Another thing Republicans have to do is wrap themselves in the Bible. This means the assumption that gay people are evil; that other religions are the enemy; that Israel is God’s Chosen People; that abortion is murder; that there is actually a “devil” out there misleading people (along with the Antichrist and the Beast); and that Armageddon is rapidly approaching.
Republican candidates must also be opposed to Mexicans. Although they will say “No, wrong. We oppose illegal immigration.” Tell it to all of the legal American-born Latino people in this country who are harassed and profiled every hour, simply because they have tinted skin.
Black Americans have largely entered into mainstream America, but Mexicans are the “new niggers” and they are being treated as such. Even conservative Hispanics admit this is a fact.
Republicans also have to believe that America was founded by Christians, based completely on fundamentalist Christian values – despite the fact that not one of the signers of the Declaration Of Independence was a Pastor or Minister, that most colonial church leaders actively preached against the revolution, and that the leaders of the revolution were agnostics, beer brewers, and men who took great pains to exclude religion from their new government.
Yet another thing Republican candidates must embrace is a commitment to oppose all attempts to protect nature. Only anti-environmentalists need apply.
And Republican candidates must oppose any effort to ban any kind of firearms, anywhere at any time. Even in places where they ought to be banned, and even weapons that have no useful purpose except that of killing humans.
One more plank they must always support: The Occupy Wall Street protesters are wrong, Wall Street is not to blame for the problems we face, the real enemy is the Obama Administration. Except that nearly every day new depredations by Wall Streeters hit the news, and all of the problems, failures, bailouts, and frauds started long before Obama became President.
Not that he has done anything to make things better, he clearly hasn’t.
There are other planks in the Republican platform that are rotten, but these are easily enough to guarantee that the Republicans cannot win in 2012, no matter who they nominate.
The Democrats haven’t got much to offer. They have done a poor job themselves.
But the Republicans have painted themselves into a dark ideological corner in which they must target people who can swallow all of the above-mentioned camels. It’s a tall order finding people who are that intellectually challenged.
Imagine you are that person:
You want millionaires to keep more of their money, even if it means you will take a $30 a week pay cut. You sing “Bomb bomb bomb, bom-bom Iran” even though you know that this will triple most of your bills and may bankrupt you. You expect the world to end any moment, and the Rapture to occur, in which millions of women and about five men will go to heaven. You believe that the Devil and his demons are possessing people and trying to drag them into a place of fiery eternal torment created by God, because He loves us. You believe that we MUST support Israel, financially and militarily, because when Jesus comes back he will assume his place as the King of the Jews and avenge all of their enemies. You believe that the foul smell in the air near the refinery is the sweet smell of capitalism, and that the oily multicolored sheen on the waters of the bay are the rainbow with the pot of gold at the end. You don’t own stocks, but you are always happy to hear that the stock markets are up, which indicates that the large corporations are increasing their profits. When you hear an Hispanic person speaking in their native tongue, it irritates the hell out of you. English should be the only language spoken.
You didn’t pay attention in History class, so you believe that the American Revolution was planned and executed by fundamentalist Christians. You keep your guns locked and loaded.
There are a lot of people like you, believe it or not. There are people who say, “Yeah, that’s me” when they read the above paragraph. Some of them are close friends of mine.
But, unfortunately, they do not add up to 50% of the population. That’s why the Republicans are screwed. That is why there will be no Republican Messiah.
So buckle up and get ready for 4 more years of a weak President who has sold his soul to Wall Street and Israel, and a divided congress that can’t work together on the most basic issues.
We have been divided and conquered, and the entire nation is locked in a tailspin by the two major parties – who represent almost none of us, but control all of us.
We have reached an impasse. It’s a Mexican standoff. No one can win at this point.
The 2nd Great Depression will continue and expand until more than 50% of the population has a cause they are willing to unanimously support – and that might mean another decade or more of going down the wrong road.