Week of 02/27/2012

Failing For Politics
– by David Matthews 2

I probably should preface this article by saying that I am neither a supporter nor a hater of President Barack Obama. I am neither a Democrat nor (currently) a member of the GOP. (Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying GOP member in the late 80’s.) I have, since 1993, afforded every incoming president the opportunity to do what is right, regardless of party or political influence, before writing them off as being miserable failures. This is something that the conservatives have failed to do, which further serves to reflect my disgust of them.

I personally believe that every president should have the opportunity to prove their critics wrong and to do what is right by the American people. They should be able to set aside political favoritism, stand above the corruption of cronyism and nepotism, and to do what is needed and what is right. That is how you respect the office of the President. You give the President the opportunity to do what is right first before you start condemning that person and conspiring to sabotage his (or her) efforts.

Unfortunately, I have discovered that this is a pretty high bar for presidents of both parties to meet. Yes, they will seemingly do right at first. Bush Junior initially did that with Afghanistan after 9/11. Obama tried to do it in his first month with the economy. But then the cronies come in, the status quo takes over, and what we are left with is nothing but spin and cheap politics.

I wish that I did not have to lead off with that disclosure, but given the caustic political environment we currently live in, I have no alternative but to provide it so people will not mistake my criticism as being part of either a liberal or conservative agenda.

Thus we come to the latest in the ongoing failure that is the Obama White House. The decision that has religious leaders and GOP Presidential contenders throwing temper tantrums.

Obama’s people have decided that religious organizations such as schools and hospitals and charity services should be forced to cover the cost of birth control for their employees as part of their healthcare programs. This is being touted as the latest in healthcare changes from the ill-named “Obamacare” program, which is about as popular as being fitted for a catheter.

I have to seriously question their judgment on this decision.

First, there is a good chance that these reforms could be undone either through Congress or by the courts. That’s good. This idea that people should be forced to pay for insurance whether they can afford to or not simply because of their existence is tantamount to slavery and it needs to be aborted as such. The liberals didn’t care for this reform when it was being signed, the conservatives certainly didn’t care for it from day one, and having Obama’s people bring this up now clearly shows that they are dangerously disconnected from the American people.

But then I started taking a look at what else is going on in the political arena, and suddenly the motive behind this decision became obvious.

This is the 2012 Presidential Election season, and unfortunately for America, the “Final Four” GOP contenders for their party’s nomination includes two well-known busybodies; a walking hypocrite named Newt Gingrich, and an infamous moralist named Rick Santorum. “How infamous,” you ask? Google his last name and see what you find. I hope you have a strong stomach.

Yes, the self-titled “culture warriors” are back, and they’re back with a vengeance. Their disdain for Obama was made crystal clear back when they were accusing him of being a Kenyan-born “sleeper agent” Muslim trained in Indonesia and getting his “marching orders” from beyond the grave. Their ammunition, though, came up blanks (no big surprise) when Obama’s “long form” birth certificate was made public and the courts realized that these Cuckoos were more than a few Cocoa-Puffs short of a balanced breakfast.

What is worse is that they are actually making political progress in subjects that were long considered done and over with. Oklahoma moralists are railroading through a “personhood” amendment as a way to outlaw abortions. And since corporations have already made “personhood” status more important than actual living human individuals, Oklahoma will not only turn mothers into indentured servants for nine months, but birth will now mark a new automatic transformation of people into third-class citizens. Corporations first, pre-natal second, post-natal third.

Abe Lincoln would be “so proud” of his party if he knew this was going on.

It’s like someone pulled up a time machine, dialed in “1984”, and started pulling in the worst of the throwbacks from the Reagan years. They don’t believe in global warming or evolution – even though they are proving that we can devolve – and once again they are screaming about the “ever-encroaching Red Threat”. But… not too loudly when it comes to China. Gotta keep Wal-Mart stocked.

So what does this have to do with Obama’s birth-control mandate? Everything.

You’ve seen how the so-called “culture warriors” react when it comes to anything coming out of Obama’s mouth. He could sing arias straight out of their favorite passages from the Bible and the best he could hear from them would be a grumbling about how “the devil could also quote scripture”. They are losing the struggle over same-sex marriages one state at a time. They lost “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. They are losing “The Defense of Marriage Act”. They’re running out of token Muslim enemies because they keep on getting killed. They are so narcissistically hypersensitive now that they make hypochondriacs look like stand-up comedians in comparison.

Is it any wonder why they would respond to this government-imposed mandate as though it was the end of the world? Is it any wonder why they would go completely batty over this and treat this as though Obama personally used their baptism pool as a toilet?

And that’s the point. That is precisely what Obama’s campaign people want the fundies to do. They want the fundies to flip out over this.

Let’s get brutally honest here… when you put some serious thought into the timing of Obama’s birth-control mandate, then you cannot help but come to the realization that this was done less for healthcare reform and more for psychological warfare against the conservatives, neo-conservatives and especially the theo-conservatives.

Obama’s campaign people want this to happen! They want the theocrats and theo-cons and moralists to go Shiite over this. They want the fundies pissed off and disturbed, because then the great unwashed could see them as being no different than their Islamic counterparts.

The problem is that the theo-cons have been doing a heck of a job all by themselves on this. Santorum has had to keep his campaign on economic issues instead of social ones, and Gingrich’s moral hypocrisy gets exposed when his marital past comes up. Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman openly played up to the fundamentalists in their respective campaigns, only to fall by the wayside early. These folks have a history of self-destructing without any help whatsoever from the Democrats. They don’t need to be coaxed into implosion.

And doing that cheapens the subject itself. In recent years, the conservatives and neo-conservatives have been guilty of trying to impose sadistic conditions on those who need social assistance, such as requiring drug tests on those who get welfare and disability. But now that the tables are being turned on them, it’s apparently being done not for some perceived social good - the same excuse being used to justify degrading those who need help - but simply as a campaign tactic.

Of course the subject of birth control coverage could have been easily resolved if Obama’s people worked to being real health care reform instead of substituting a bureaucratic abomination designed to give the insurance industry perverse power over us. A default coverage, dubbed by some as “Medicare for all”, would have allowed insurance providers to be as stingy or as generous as their corporate consciences would permit. Then those religious groups, hospitals, and schools could continue to impose whatever healthcare restrictions they wanted for their employees, as long as they knew that those same employees could “opt out” and either get their own coverage or stand by the default one.

But I suppose that makes far too much sense, doesn’t it? Plus it only reminds us that what we have now in terms of “reform” is far from what was either intended or needed. It is yet another reminder of how Obama’s people have failed the American people.

Week of 02/20/2012

The Politics of Emotional Blackmail
– by David Matthews 2

Imagine having someone you love in the hospital. They’re sick. They’re hooked up to machines, they’re coughing and puking and crying in misery, and all you can do is just watch and be there for them.

The doctor then tells you that your loved one is going to be in misery for a very long time. There’s nothing that can be done to make this person comfortable. They are going to be in complete agony, suffering every single day, and there is nothing that he or you can do about it.

However, the doctor says that there may be a cure. There is a remote chance that a certain drug could help cure your loved one, or at least to lessen the misery that they’re going through. The doctor would like to try the drug, but some bureaucrat is preventing it. He suggests that maybe if you were to convince the bureaucrat to okay the drug, he could then give it to your loved one, and it would cut down on some of the misery.

So you find the bureaucrat and you start a one-person campaign to harass and hassle and cajole that bureaucrat to relent. Now the bureaucrat tells you that the drug in question is still just experimental. They haven’t even finished testing it on animals yet. They don’t know the full extent of the side-effects. They don’t even know if it would work in the way that it was being touted as.

But that doesn’t matter, does it? No, because every day, you’re having to sit by your loved one’s side as they are moaning and crying and puking. They’re begging for help, and you can’t do a thing. It’s breaking your heart to have to go through this, and the doctor constantly tells you that “salvation” would come if only the bureaucrat could change his mind and approves the use of this drug.

You launch a personal vendetta against the bureaucrat. You drag the media into it. You get your friends into it. You make it your mission in life to make that bureaucrat suffer for every day that you suffer and for every day that your loved one suffers.

Finally the bureaucrat relents. He approves the testing of the drug. The doctor says thank you for your persistence, and that the drug would help a lot of people… eventually. It just won’t help your loved one. Not right now, anyway. But there is another drug that “could” help…

How many of you would want to punch that doctor’s lights out right then and there, after all that you went through? I’m sure a lot of us would understand if you were in that situation and you were strung along like that. We would want that doctor lynched for playing on your emotions, especially for something that doesn’t even do what the doctor was leading you to believe it to do.

So why aren’t we doing this right now with the politicians and members of the media when it comes to the price of gasoline? They certainly deserve it after playing this very trick on us repeatedly.

There is an annual game that we all are forced to play, and it goes something like this: every year right around this time, the price of gasoline at the pump creeps up and up and up. Executives from Big Oil and their “good friends” in the corporate-owned media will whip up a few dozen reasons to justify the hike – other than just economic greed, of course. They will blame the government on their ever-changing “boutique” blend regulations; they will blame Islamic extremists in the Middle East and Africa; they will blame it on the “forced shutdown” of key refineries; they will blame problems with the ports; they will blame competition from China and India; they will blame unrest in Europe; they will blame Wall Street insecurities; they will even blame the weather if there are enough hurricanes that year. If a sheik stubs his toe or if a futures expert gets his math wrong, the price at the pump doesn’t just go up, it goes up that very day. Sometimes even that very hour! Price hikes are instantaneous, but price drops supposedly take weeks, if not months, before they can take effect.

Every excuse and justification is offered to the masses except for the honest one: “Because we can.”

Then we hear about the effects of these higher gas prices. We hear about how the cost of living will go up, because trains and planes and trucks all rely on gas, and if that cost goes up, then so does the cost of the goods they transport. It costs us more to heat our homes, it costs us more to get to work, it costs us more to buy our groceries, and that’s money that we don’t have right now, do we? Certainly not now, thanks to Wall Street and “Too Big To Fail”. So we are all going to suffer even more because of the price at the pump, even if we do the smart thing and cut down on driving (which, by the way, we really don’t).

Then we hear about the supposed “solution”. There’s a bill, or a program, or a pipeline, or a trade agreement that’s being held up in Washington by a bunch of mealy-mouthed bureaucrats. Maybe there’s a warlord that needs to be ousted from office. Maybe there’s a terror cell that needs to be exterminated. Some “bureaucrat” is not letting things get done, and because of that, we are all suffering at the gas pump.

So we’re told that “salvation” will come when we can get this bill passed, or this program implemented, or this pipeline approved, or this trade agreement ratified. We need to get the “green-light” to bomb the warlord and break up the terror cell. Anything that we can do to help out Big Oil, we need to do it, and we need to do it right this very minute, because if we don’t then our misery will only “get worse”.

We then go ahead and call our congressmen and senators, we hassle the “bureaucrats”, we call up the White House and demand that “action” be taken. And all the while, we ignore the little disclaimer that is coming out about this action; the disclaimer that says that any action that is taken today won’t really help us tomorrow. We don’t want to hear that disclaimer, because we’re only listening the dings of the gas pump as they siphon more and more money out of our pockets, and the continual drum beat sponsored by Big Oil telling us that our collective suffering is all the fault of some “bureaucrat”.

You can probably figure out what happens next. The bill gets passed, the program gets implemented, the pipeline is approved, the trade agreement is ratified, the warlord is bombed, and the terror cell is destroyed. The politicians and their good buddies in the media and Big Oil all thank us for our diligence and our persistence in overcoming the obstruction of the bureaucrats.

But does the price at the pump go down? No. Not in the least. In fact, if anything, it may even go up. Because we all find out that it wasn’t really the bill or the program or the pipeline or the trade agreement or the warlord or even the terror cell that were behind the price spikes. Sure, that much-touted “solution” may help us all out eventually… but not today and probably not even tomorrow. Weren’t you paying attention to the disclaimer?

And as with every other time this game is played, the price at the pump does eventually go down… in time for the Holidays, when we are expected to spend more gas driving to the stores for midnight sales, and to relatives on the other side of the country. Then, come the spring, we play this game all over again.

Let’s get brutally honest here… we are all the victims of this ugly, pervasive, and systematic con job being perpetrated by politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, and the paid whores of the corporate media. This game is played on us year after year after year, and with the exception of the October Crash of 2008 and the aftermath that followed, we have been willing dupes to its deception.

This is emotional blackmail for the sake of political and corporate gain. Rather than addressing and attacking the real sources of our misery, we are offered some placebo “remedy” complete with a willing patsy as our Goldstein-style enemy. We are told that this remedy is our solution, only to discover after the fact that it really was just a diversion.

And we are playing this game right now.

For 2012, the placebo “solution” is a pipeline deal. A pipeline cutting through from Canada to Louisiana that would supposedly guarantee hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide cheap oil. But some bureaucrat in the State Department is supposedly holding this up. “Pass it now,” we are being told, “or else that oil will go to China! Your misery at the pump is because that pipeline is being held up! Get it passed and the price will go down!”

In previous years, though, we were told a different story. Last year it was supposedly because of “Arab unrest” during the Arab Spring uprisings. Previously, we were told that it was the fault of oil being pumped from Cuba. Or it was because we couldn’t look for oil in some protected stretch of Arctic tundra. Remember the Alaskan Pipeline? Guess where that oil is ending up? (Here’s a hint: it’s not in American gas pumps.)

In 2003 we actually went to war in Iraq on the promise that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would, among other things, give us lower prices at the pump. Remember that? Yeah, that was the time when a Bush President actually admitted that it would be about “blood for oil”.

How about the great con-job of 2005? Remember that one? I do. It was the summer just before Hurricane Katrina. Gas prices were still going up and up and up with no end in sight. George W. Bush, the GOP’s lord and savior, said that our economic “salvation” rested with an Energy Policy bill that Vice-President Dick Cheney personally worked on but was being “held up” in the Senate. “Get that to his desk,” he told the American people, “and that will help us out with the high gas prices.”

I’m sure nobody – except for myself – found it somewhat strange that the White House would have trouble getting anything past both houses of Congress under same-party control, but the masses spoke out, and the bill was passed, and Bush Junior signed it, and as he signed it, he casually dropped the other shoe on us. No, the Energy Policy won’t lower gas prices, either then or in the immediate future. In fact it would take ten or fifteen years before we could see any kind of results. But, thanks for getting it to his desk so he could have his grandiose signing ceremony.

You know what? I’ll bet you that if we called out the politicians and the lobbyists and the members of the media back in 2005 and bitch-slapped each of them for their duplicity, we would not be hearing the same con game being played on us today.

There have been only two times when the price of gasoline sank with the same speed as it previously rose. The first was right after the ground offensive started in the Gulf War, when the so-called “mother of all battles” was about as one-sided as a tug-of-war against Mount Rushmore. The second time was in October of 2008, when Wall Street was on the verge of collapse. If you want those gas prices to go down, you may want to start looking there for immediate relief.

There are real solutions to our collective economic pain. The sooner we enact them, the sooner our own relief will come. The problem is that those solutions do not benefit the people behind our misery at the gas pump. They would rather see you in poverty and in misery than to give up one percentage point in profit or one iota of power. It is high time that we stop listening to these quacks and their manipulative snake oil “solutions” and start listening to that second opinion… the one that actually makes sense.

Week of 02/13/2012

Are We Seeing The Taming Of The Shrewd?
– by David Matthews 2

In the deluge of political polls and results from primaries and caucuses, it should be no surprise to see the name of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on the top of most GOP lists.

He is, after all, the supposed “front-runner”, the “preferred” candidate for the party bosses. When compared to the other “final four” candidates, he always comes out as the “sane” one.

But in what can only be considered a serious “shocker” in politics, Mitt Romney ended up at the top of one of the most unlikely of polls: the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll.

This comes completely out of left-field, with emphasis on “left”, because the one thing that conservatives have been screaming bloody murder about concerning Romney is that he continually falls short of the “conservative” standard. They accuse him of being a “moderate”, or even a “liberal”, with the same spit and revulsion that they reserve for Democrats. They complain that he’s no different than the current President. Worse, they claim that President Obama patterned his programs after Romney’s gubernatorial versions.

And now, the annual weekend love-fest for the conservatives wraps up with the knowledge that the “anti-conservative” just walked away with their own straw poll. How crazy is that, huh?

So the question is… are the conservatives ready to accept “the inevitable”? Are they finally ready to “grit and bear” having Romney as their nominee?

On the onset, it may seem this way. Pseudo-libertarian Neal Boortz has pretty much accepted Romney as the GOP “messiah” on his radio show, as much as he would wish otherwise. Abrasive columnist Ann Coulter certainly was singing the praises of Romney at CPAC as she tossed out her usual verbal jabs at everyone else. (Bear in mind that she reportedly hated Romney last year.) Showboating businessman Donald Trump told the conservative attendees that his “chosen boy” Romney is the only one that would win. The drum-beat does seem to suggest that the conservatives are ready to give up and give in to the “mellow” side.

But are the conservatives really ready to toss in the towel?

This commentator thinks otherwise.

Let’s get brutally honest here… I don’t think the conservatives are ready to default to Romney quite yet. Sure the writing may be all over the CPAC walls, but, hey, conservatives are known for writing things, not reading them. Reading is part of that whole “intellectual” thing, and they have already condemned anything “intellectual” as being tools of Marxist indoctrination.

The one thing that can be said about the Conservative Shrewd, the dominant GOP loon, is that it hates being told what to do. Conservative Shrewds are used to telling other people what to do, not vice-versa. They see the drum-beat of “Rom-ney, Rom-ney, Rom-ney” as being a taunt, and they will act accordingly.

The conservatives certainly haven’t given up on their downward spiral towards Iran-style extremism, with wild accusations coming from Rick Santorum himself about Obama throwing Christians to the guillotine, and even accusing Romney’s camp of rigging the ballots in the CPAC poll. It’s only a matter of time before Newt Gingrich follows along with his own crazy train accusations to try to prove that he’s still relevant. (I would toss a mention of Ron Paul in there, except the GOP already considers actual libertarian leanings to be crazy, so his supporters really don’t need to do anything wacky.)

Besides, as of this column, the primaries and caucuses have only just begun. Only a handful of states have made their choices and Romney’s lead was far from certain in some of them. One day Romney wins, then Newt Gingrich wins a few, then Rick Santorum sweeps three states, then Romney again. We haven’t even gotten to the “Supers” yet, when multiple states all have their primaries and caucuses on the same day. Once that happens, then we’ll see which one of the four sides of the GOP has truly got the favor of the voters.

And of course it should be noted that as this is going on, President Barack Obama really doesn’t have to do a thing to support his re-election campaign. All he has to do is listen to the Conservative Shrewds squawk on and on about guillotines and rigged polls within their own nests, and then point to them and ask the American people “Do you really want to give these loons the keys to the Oval Office?” He doesn’t even have to worry about the answer.

That’s sad, too, because as long as the Conservative Shrewds continue to run rampant across the political landscape, there is no pressure for President Obama to actually do anything to gain the support of the American people. His people continue to allow the banking criminals to get away with their criminal acts. He’s still plugging away with his so-called “Heathcare Reform” tweaks, even though his “reform” has already screwed over millions of Americans as part of the continual overall economic plunder. He doesn’t really have to do anything different from what he’s been doing the past three years. He just has to sit back and watch as the Shrewds make the case for his re-election simply through their own lunacy.

Yes there will be a point when the drum-beat march will become a lullaby for the Conservative Shrewds. But that point comes as the GOP Convention draws near, when they have expended all of their energy trying to prove their case and the dominant candidate is already apparent. Until then, this is one breed of loon that we all just have to put up with as long as we refuse to vote third party.

Week of 02/06/2012

The Four Sides of the GOP
– by David Matthews 2

There is a reason why President Barack Obama is sitting pretty comfortably in the Oval Office in 2012.

Actually there are four reasons, and their names are Mitt, Newt, Ron, and Rick. The “Final Four” of GOP contenders.

Now, politics being what it is, this quartet could very well become a trio very soon, but as of this column, you have in the spotlight the four people that not only are the remaining contenders for the GOP Nominee for President, but you also have the four faces of the GOP itself.

In Mitt Romney, we obviously have “the establishment” being represented here. He’s the “old guard”, the traditional party determined to get and hold power by appealing to the general masses. He’s not the “ideal” candidate, but much like John McCain in 2008, George W. Bush in 2000, and Bob Dole in 1996, he appears to be the one that the voters “default” to. When compared to the others on the ballot, Romney comes out as “not as bad”, which political purists may despise, but they’re really not the ones that have the final say, and they know it.

In Newt Gingrich, we have the rabid insurrectionists. He represents the so-called “true conservative”, the guy that wants to shut the government down just out of spite… and actually did at one point when he was Speaker of the House. Again, far from perfect; he carries more personal baggage than a reality show diva on a photoshoot. But that doesn’t matter to the purists. He carried their banner in the 90’s, he has kept himself busy thanks to FoxNews and his fictional book tours, and he made sure people remember him even as he tries to re-write his own history to ignore those “embarrassing moments”. He’s the candidate that the conservative purists want as the party’s nominee.

In Ron Paul, we clearly have the libertarian, anti-government, and anti-federal factions. As the Congressman from Texas, Dr. Paul has a solid record of opposing the expansion of the federal government, going against even members of his own party. When it comes to cutting the federal budget and eliminating government agencies, you can’t find a better champion of that than Paul. Even Gingrich, with his claim of balancing the federal budget (even if that was from factors that had nothing to do with the GOP), wouldn’t be willing to make the cuts that Paul would support.

Finally we have Rick Santorum. In Santorum we have the evangelical crowd; the self-righteous, self-serving, moralistic, do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do busybodies. The ones that firmly believe that America is “condemned by God” as long as government doesn’t operate according to their standards and their dictates. Unlike Gingrich, Santorum has no personal baggage on him. Rather, his fault is with the company he keeps and the ultimate goals of that political faction. They don’t want to turn the country into a Christian theocracy; they firmly believe that it was already one from the start.

There you have it, folks. The four sides of the GOP being represented by the four candidates; and only one of them will end up at the top of the November Presidential ballot for the GOP.

Are you ready to vote third party yet?

The problem is that these four facets really don’t like each other. The “pure conservatives” as represented by Gingrich despise Romney and everything that Romney stands for. They hate the man, they hate his record, and they even hate his religion… even though they will be very careful to not admit to that part. They consider Romney a “moderate”, or even a “liberal”, that will say and do anything to get and keep power. In conservative circles, those two labels are worse than “sluts” and “whores”.

Romney reeks of Corporate America, but he’s really not the only one. As stated before, and needs to be stated as often as possible, Gingrich has way too much personal baggage, and some of that baggage deals with his own link to Corporate America and to the elites that continue to cannibalize the United States from within. Gingrich’s worst enemies are his past and his ego, both of which are competing in size with the federal debt. Should he get elected, I’m sure that psychologists will retire Narcissus and begin to refer to that dangerously self-centered personality disorder as “Gingrichism”.

Doctor Paul means well, and he has proven to have the determination to stay through a campaign to the bitter end, no matter how “bitter” that end may be. The problem is that the GOP hates libertarians. They’ll give libertarians lip service about shrinking government, but, as a party in general, they certainly fail to practice what they preach. Paul’s “don’t start none, won’t be none” approach to foreign affairs, for instance, flies in the face of the GOP’s favorite game of World Domination as a way to promote “world peace”. They certainly don’t like his social solutions. End the Drug War? Are you kidding? Stop prosecuting the adult entertainment world? Are you sick?

Of course it should be noted that even some libertarians aren’t fans of Paul’s stances, because while Paul thinks that the federal government should be leaving people alone, he has no qualms whatsoever allowing state and local governments to do the same thing. So he’s not as much a libertarian as he is a traditional anti-federalist.

Then there is Santorum’s faction. Again, Santorum’s the anti-Gingrich in terms of personal baggage, but that’s really not why he’s running for President, nor why the evangelicals are desperate to support him. They want someone that they know will champion their dreams of conquest. These guys are polarizing, and when you’re trying to appeal to the mainstream crowd in November, the party bosses don’t want them to be the face of the party!

Worst comes to worst, though, Santorum’s faction will probably be the first of the four to fold, especially if he continues to remain at the bottom of the primaries and caucuses. No real loss, though, as the evangelicals are used to political arm-twisting after the elections. This is what makes them dangerous. They’re used to manipulating behind-the-scenes. They can even continue to hold out until the national convention to lobby for some party concessions.

So there you have it… the four sides of the GOP squabbling over which of their chosen champions are “better”, and foolishly believing that somehow they can beat Barack Obama in November when all is said and done.

You guys ready to vote third party yet?

Let’s get brutally honest here… if you still wonder why President Obama is confident that he will be re-elected in November, then all you have to do is look at whom the GOP is trying to decide between as the competition. Their odds-on favorite is someone that most of their own people say they’d have to grit and accept, and the other three would practically hand Obama those four more years on a silver platter.

Even if they manage to come together by November, what do they really have to offer as an alternative to Obama? Romney’s friends contributed to the bleeding of jobs. Gingrich’s friends helped create the housing bubble. Santorum’s friends are more fixated on “saving” American’s collective soul than in getting it out of the Great Recession. And Paul’s efforts would trade in one Big Brother for fifty Medium Brothers and a few thousand Little Brothers. Not much of a “solution” when you think about it. But, then again, the GOP doesn’t want you to think; just to obey.

Unfortunately what you see is the end result of decades of political polarization; of factions that have convinced themselves that they are right all of the time, and that compromise is only something that the “other side” does. And the only reason why they continue to think this way is because the vast majority of the electorate are convinced that these guys are the only alternative to Obama’s continual Fail Machine.

So… you guys finally ready to vote third party yet? That’s really the only way you’re going to get better quality candidates.