Sept. 7, 2008:
…If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress….
…A new President isn’t the end of the nightmare, kids. It’s just the beginning of a new one. And unless the big O has it in his power to somehow reshape the whole of American political culture over the past 20 years, things are not going to change one little bit….
You don’t need ideas, you don’t need plans, you can ignore your track record. All you have to do is scream loud and long enough, and wait for the idiots of the press to regurgitate what you say without giving a single thought to whether it’s true, or accurate, or even sane. You can run the country into the ground for the worse part of a decade, then single-mindedly sandbag anyone who tries to turn it around, then blame the fiasco on them – and get away with it.
Get ready, because starting next January, it’s going to be 1995 again. The rednecks are going to take any win this November as a complete validation of what they espouse – and the googly-eyed simpletons of the press will go right along with that. Why yes, the entire country does want to privatize Medicare, hand over Social Security to Goldman Sachs, punch holes all though the Constitution, introduce segregation for Muslims, eliminate all taxes on anybody with money, and carry on our politics at the same level of intelligence as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin or any other drooling retard from Dixie. You’re going to see an endless parade of those slobbering hicks, carrying out Congressional hearings into everything Rush Limbaugh’s army of mental defectives can conceive of. ACORN? The “New Black Panther Party”? The First Lady’s “40-person-junket to Spain”? All of this and more, more, more – up to and including another government shutdown to save us all from the horror brought on by forcing insurance companies to actually provide the services they’re paid for.
This is what you have to look forward to if the GOP gets control of even one chamber of Congress. They’re not running on any policy ideas, they’re not running on anything even as substantive as the Contract With America – they’re running on the collected ravings of Glenn Beck and the pants-shitting fears of a million racist rednecks. And a win will be interpreted – by them, and by their apologists on TV – as a mandate to indulge those fears and ravings.
Save the date, bookmark it. If it doesn’t come to pass, I’ll take you out to the local speakeasy for drinks on me and we can all laugh at my fever-swamp paranoia. But I won’t bother putting any money back now to cover the tab.