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Behold The Pro-Cancer, Let The Elderly Eat Catfood Republican Presidential Field
It should be made clear from the jump that the winnowing-out process to determine which Republican faces Barack Obama next year is working as intended even if at times it more resembles the making of sausage than democracy in action. After all, the 2008 Democratic field had no fewer than eight would-be worthies at the starting gate, including Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Evan Bayh, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack and some guy by the name of Biden.
While a few of these Democratic wannabes had policy positions outside the mainstream, they were only slightly so and virtually indistinguishable from one another. By the mainstream I mean views held by a majority of voters, and in offering this definition I acknowledge that the mainstream has shifted toward the conservative side in the new millennium.
Many of the policy positions of the candidates in the Republican field also are indistinguishable except that these candidates have views well outside the mainstream. In fact, views well beyond the right field bleachers.
Allowing for flipping (being strident) for the benefit of your primary voter constituency and flopping (moderating that stridency) for general election voters, any of the Republican candidates are capable of the chameleon-like behavior commonplace among politicians of all stripes. But if the eventual nominee is not Mitt Romney or John Huntsman, the election is Barack Obama’s to lose and the GOP will have blown an historic opportunity to take back the White House.
Fourteen months out, the only scenario that I see in which Obama would become a one-term president is if voters in sufficient numbers blame him for not pulling jobs out of his presidential hat, a blame that in fairness must be shared with obstructionist congressional Republicans and most especially big business.
As the dust settles from the Republican presidential debate in Los Angeles last week, it is increasingly difficult to not see Perry as the frontrunner among the party’s Tea Party faithful and Romney as the frontrunner among the party’s shrunken moderate base.
Michele Bachmann, doncha know, is in free fall, and when she lands it will be with less with a splat than a thud as she plows into an increasing large pile of also-rans that includes Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.
At least the party has Rudy Giuliani waiting in the wings. “I might get into the race if I think we are truly desperate,” America’s mayor says. Democrats hope that is so.
Perry’s biggest problem as the nominee will be his wackadoodle views on stuff people care about. That is to say the mainstream.
It is one thing if Perry believes in the Tooth Fairy, but for him to repeatedly hammer home his view that Social Security is “a giant con game” will win him no friends among senior citizens, some of whom are Republicans and 57 percent of whom recently told CNN pollsters that they don’t want major changes to the program. Then there are the all-important Independents, nearly 70 percent of whom oppose major changes.
You can bet your 10-gallon hat that Obama is smiling. And that we will see video clips over and over during the president’s re-election run of Perry dissing a retirement benefit that has paid out nearly $6 trillion dollars — sometimes the difference between eating cat food and a reasonable standard of living — to everyday Americans in this decade alone and will pay trillions more to future retirees.
Compared to Bachmann, Perry seems almost, uh . . . button down when attacking Washington, a sure-fire applausegetter on the stumpbut even a cursory examination of the reality behind his attacks reveals him to be Bachmann-esque in his ability to obfuscate.
Exhibit A in this regard is the Texas governor’s assertion the reason that an astonishing one-fourth of his state’s population has no health insurance is because of “government interference.” Never mind that the 49 other states have to contend with the same “interference.”
And in what state are the most residents covered?
Massachusetts, where only about 5 percent of the population is uninsured because of the passage of health-care reform when Romney was governor, a factoid that should be a cause for celebration but one that he now tries to run away from because it is an object of scorn to Tea Partiers, who apparently never get sick nor will ever need the largesse of Washington when they retire.
As is often the case, the also-rans beat up on the presumed frontrunner of the moment at the L.A. debate.
And so you had the sight of Bachmann, Paul and Santorum heaping scorn on Perry for an initiative to get girls in Texas inoculated against cervical cancer, a leading cause of which are STDs.
Because, you know, the margin of victory for a long shot Republican candidate might be their being against cancer prevention.
The debate was at the Ronald Reagan Library. And despite the many differences I had with the Gipper, he has never seemed better compared to the current crop of crackpot Republican wannabes.
Oh, one other thing: The major parties have nominated only two ideologically extreme candidates in modern history — Barry Goldwater and George McGovern — and we know what befell them come Election Day.
10 Responses to “Behold The Pro-Cancer, Let The Elderly Eat Catfood Republican Presidential Field”
lol
The Tea baggers are determining their party platform debate from the myriad of screwball attention grabber topics brought up buy Republicans over the years. They cannot get their way by logic, therefore the illogical must be the answer!
It appears that Looney-Toon, and Neo Looney-Toon, cannot abide.
Actually Perry was for the vaccine (amazingly enough) before he was against it. Overall though he come across as rather astoundingly backward in his views, a condition that will endear him with a great many republicans, but ought to cause crashing and burning in a general election where a great many voters aren’t particularly turned (with some notable exceptions) on by people who flaunt their ignorance and sociopathy.
JSpencer, Shaun…
The T-Party debate.
Somebody picked a real winner for singing the national anthem. I mean really…..really…scary.
Pro-Cancer?
Surely you mean, anti-forced vaccination.
A candidate’s opposition to laws mandating the HPV vaccine no more makes him/her pro-cancer than my opposition to drug prohibition makes me pro-heroin use.
I’ll admit that there are plenty of uninformed anti-vaccination people out there who are spreading anti-vaccination propaganda (my own take is that people who refuse to vaccinate their children out of fear that vaccinations might harm their children ought to be intellectually consistent enough to refuse to allow their children to ride in automobiles given that the odds of dying in an automobile accident is many thousands of times higher than the odds of suffering a severe adverse reaction from a vaccine).
Still, we ought not to conflate being opposition to laws mandating the HPV vaccine with being pro-cancer. That is not a rational argument.
Perry is still pro HPV vaccine. He just admits that mandating it’s usage by executive order was wrong. Personally I cant think of one candidate that has said they are anti vaccine at all, which there are those on both the right and left who are, the issue of forced vaccination is a separate one. Crap by this illogic every politician out there is pro flu since not one is pushing involuntary flu vaccinations.
SS is a giant pyramid scheme with is going broke and will have to be changed. The shocking thing is how Shaun and others keep trying to pretend it’s not true. That idolatry can blind someone to such glaring facts is amazing but thats life. Stating that SS will fail if not changed is just good sense and in no way equates to wanting to feed cat food to grandma. No one is going to make any changes to anyone who is getting anything right now or even for years to come. The idea that SS will never be changed… that’s wackadoodle. It will be changed or it will just fail.
“SS is a giant pyramid scheme with is going broke and will have to be changed.”
Yes. The problem is what kind of changes?
Republicans will gut as much of the social safety net as is politically possible, regardless of the usefulness and justification for said gutting. This is because their agenda is to increase the well-being of capital owners and the already wealthy as much as possible, without concern for the needs of labor providers.
The deficit, health care costs etc. – these issues are discussed by the GOP only as excuses for destroying the New Deal and lowering taxes for the rich and powerful. Shock doctrine.
EEllis:
I am a columnist. Please allow me a wee bit of poetic license on the vaccine issue.
Social Security does indeed face a financial shortfall that Congress will have to deal with. But that is very different from what Perry is saying in flat out denouncing it as unconstitutional (false) and a “giant con game” (ditto).
Mr Rivera,
Had this been a vaccine that prevented Lung Cancer and had to be administered to 10 year old’s to work, do you think that we would be having this conversation?
But it’s a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer, hoo a part of the female sexual organ, can’t have that.
Quelcrist Falconer said:
I have no idea. I suspect that the HPV vaccine is receiving the attention that it is largely due to the fact that Rick Perry mandated the vaccine via an executive order.
That it is a vaccine that has to do with preventing STDs might make it more controversial in conservative circles is certainly possible. But I don’t see what that has to do with my original point.
Being opposed to the government mandating of the HPV vaccine does not make one pro-cancer.
Columnist shouldn’t mean writer of fiction.