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...a blog by Richard Flowers

Friday, October 10, 2008

Day 2837: Senator Oven-Chip, if you want to know the moment you lost the Presidency… it was "that one"

Tuesday:




With the Replutocrats tanking in the polls, things are starting to get DIRTY in the campaign to be President of Americaland.

While, Ms Sarah Pain steps up her efforts to replace the Monkey-in-Chief as VICE-President (making her a sort of Monkey-in-Lipstick, you might say), not to mention whipping up a potential race riot by calling Barry O all SORTS of names (and no doubt she'd say "he smells" too), the Superannuated Senator supposedly at the top of the ticket has been chuckling and wheezing and calling everyone "miii frynds" but cannot even bring himself to use his opponent's NAME.


In the OLD days, you could rely upon the pundits and spin doctors to announce victory regardless of the actual candidates' performance. Faux News would give a "fair and balanced" victory to the Replutocrats and keep repeating it through the news cycle until everyone believes that it could have happened that way.

Of course that is HARDER to do when someone conducts a snap poll that asks actual VOTERS what they thought

…and they only go and decide almost 2:1 in Barry O's favour.

But watching the actual debate on the television, it is difficult to understand how even the most die hard with a tea-towel Replutocrat could have scored it as a win for their man.

Presumably they get special lessons from the "Sarah-cuda" in how to ignore FACTS by sticking your fluffy feet in your ears and singing La La La.

It is TRUE that at times Barry O comes across as a bit "the Professor". But Senator Oven-Chip spent almost the entire debate acting like the CREEPY CARETAKER out of Scooby Doo. Presumably Sarah Pain will pull off the FRIGHT MASK at the end and reveal that it was HIM all along… and he would have got away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling forty-seven year-old kid!

Daddy Alex noticed that the only time when he started to unbend was on the foreign-policy question about Pakistan. It is clear that this is the subject he is actually knowledgeable about and therefore comfortable with. Which is fine, but the President has got to deal with the UNCOMFORTABLE stuff as well. That's pretty much the job description. Buck; here; stopping; that sort of thing. Senator Oven-Chip's inability to CARE ABOUT, let alone UNDERSTAND, the issues that are frightening the bejeezus out of ordinary Americans is what disqualifies him from doing the job.

Take, for example, the Senator's new policy, seemingly plucked out of his ar the air right there in the studio, to buy up everyone's mortgage and renegotiate them at the new (lower) value of the homes.

Now, this would go waaaaay beyond GENEROUS to homeowners, by having the taxpayer take the immediate hit of all that fall in property prices. This is unlike any other plan that has been suggested. Taking on the debts and accepting that some, many even, will fall bad but still recovering SOME money from others is one thing… but this plan is just taking a big pile of money and burning it. It is almost certain that property prices will recover given time, so it would appear that the Senator is suggesting giving a free capital gain to everyone with negative equity.

If he understood the subject, then he would realise at once that this is either a colossal tossing of dollars into the money pit, or a total fabrication designed to make populist capital from the dispossessed. Either way, it looks both stupid and desperate at the same time.

Likewise with the mud-slinging. Rather than turning things around, he and his running mate make it LOOK like they know they've lost and they've got nothing left.

Just seeing the moment where Barry O responds to Senator Oven-Chip's "talk softly and carry a big stick" jibe. "This is the man who said 'Bomb Bomb Iran'," Barry reminds us. And in the background, Senator Oven-Chip looks ashamed. Worse than that, he looks worn-out and defeated. In the worst possible way, he looks old.

Of course, to a certain extent this is WHY the Replutocrats picked him. They always EXPECTED that their guy was going to have to "take one for the party"; that's why they selected a muggins who wasn't really "one of them". They picked the "maverick" (read: "not wingnut ENOUGH!") so that they can claim his failure is because of his LACK of purity, not because of their total and utter bonkers-in-the-nut-dom.

It's possible that they didn't calculate just how many of them he might take down with him, though!

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