Peter Sterry
21st Century Wire
In America, Republicans are celebrating like it’s 1994, while Democrats are pretending like nothing has really happened.
If you’re neither an Elephant, nor a Jackass, in other words, if you happen to one those street urchins called Independents or Libertarians, or worse, a Green – then no, nothing of significance really did happen this week for you. It’s business as usual, both parties pretending to occupy the middle, but smoking the same brand of ‘big gov/big bruv’ cigarettes…
Before Tuesday, it was the Democratic White House and the Harry Reid Senate strong-arming a Republican House into submission. After Tuesday, it’s the new GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, backed by a much fatter, redder House of Representatives – who will straddle the Democratic White House, demanding the defiant Obama cry uncle.
The run-up to this year’s November US midterm elections was nothing short of epic. First they hit voters with ISIS in July, then moved on swiftly to Ebola in August, before finally rounding it all out in the climax to this week’s race to control the all important US Senate. While Michael Savage claimed his books were responsible for the “historic election sweep”, Republican party operatives in the US media, most notably Sean Hannity and ‘Pastor’ Glenn Beck tried in vain to scare their hard core ‘conservative’ audiences to near death by somehow linking ISIS-to-Ebola-to-Obama. It didn’t work – as was evidenced by this year’s top four Halloween costumes according to UC Santa Barbara’s Isla Vista 2014 Party Costume Power Ranking:
1. Sarah Palin Ebola Nurse Fettish/Raver outfits (BSL-4 certified).
2. ISIS/ISIL Terrorist garb (w/out white Air Jordans – Image Source: Twitter).
3. Alan Combes (post-second facelift).
4. Michelle and Barack Gender-Flip (couples only).
Once Americans put FOX’s fear behind them, it was down to the business of politics, and the numbers game…
How the Right Won…
This wasn’t a particularly hard one to call in advance. With any competitive contest, winning and losing ultimately comes down to energy (and money). The Right had the energy (and the money) and the Left did not.
The Right were visibly confident in the run-up to November 4th, and were duly mobilised. The Democrats did not execute their “ground game”, nor did they “deliver voters to the polls”, but Republicans did. They pushed hard for two months to get their people to vote, running with a pretty simple, easy-to-read no-brainer platform which was basically, “Anti-Obama”. They had polling numbers to back that up too, with the Democratic President presently sporting some of the lowest job approval ratings of any two term President in recorded history – much lower than Nero’s during the great fire, and even lower still than Jimmy Carter’s.
In fact, this week’s midterm flip – and POTUS dip, is being celebrated by the Carter camp who seem to be off the hook and no longer being unfairly singled out as “the worst US President in living memory”.
Money talks. spent the money needed to increase their majority. Super PAC’s poured more money into political ad campaigns for the Right, including millions that were spend at the last minute. The Democrats didn’t come near the amount of overall exposure that Republicans had through media buying, and pundits on both the left and the right were baffled as to why not. It’s almost as if the Democrats were planning to throw the midterms.
Used Tea Bags
If you’ve ever been to a Tea Party event the first thing you notice is that the average age of the people there is around 60 years old. No youth = politically irrelevant. The Stars and Stripes rallies, BBQ’s and bakes sales will still continue, but the Tea Party is basically over.
Tuesday’s midterms proved what many with brains have suspected (and saying) for a long time – that the Tea Party is nothing more than a controlled opposition wing within the Republican Party establishment. After the sweaty excitement has evaporated from Tea Party dark horse David Brat, a college economics professor, who beat Republican House No.2 guy Eric Cantor for his Virginia seat during the summer primaries, the Tea Party are left with little get high on – so what did they go and do on Tuesday? On command by the Reverend Beck, like good little red robots, they slavishly bloc voted-in every Republican candidate – and incumbent. So much for Beck’s ‘Second American Revolution’. What a lark. Hey, but gas is below $3 bucks a gallon!
The writing is on the wall. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has already thrown his box of Tea overboard, opting for a seat with Bilderberg instead, and the constant whining by Ted Cruz (still pretending to be ‘presidential’) is no longer interesting, bordering on tragic already. The novelty of the ‘Not-a-Party’ party gimmick is way past its sell-by date.
How the Left Lost…
Hubris. As the old liberal adage goes, “If you’re number #1, why try harder?”.
Comedy Central: Obama brushes of his party’s meltdown in the midterms, tells more jokes to impress the media.
If one single word survives in the Obama legacy, it’s ‘winning’. The Democrats have had a near obsession with forcing a win on every major issue, or bill. When you control the White House and the Senate, you’ve effectively gamed the system, and any gridlock means you can simply blame the House. This more or less sums up the current state of the Democratic Party in the US.
Yes, it’s true – the Left gets as drunk on power as the Right does. Still hungover from 2012, the midterm defeat hasn’t yet registered with Obama, or Obama’s brain (his speech writers)…
His reaction to the electoral slaughter was that of indifference – acting cool and coy, as usual. Obama couldn’t resist his mandatory peacock moment through, like a mob boss laying down an opaque, sideways challenge, essentially threatening to bypass the democratic process by ramming through his own personal ‘immigration reform’ bill (more on that later) via a presidential executive order before the lame duck Congress gets thrown out like last year’s frozen fruit cake at Christmas.
Obama got the cold shoulder simply because of the fear of being pulled down by his current unpopularity. With a blue state candidates telling the Dear Leader to “stay away”, they were also courting campaign support from the Clintons. That didn’t seem to work very well either. Kentucky Senate loser, Alison Lundergen Grimes (Photo, left) tried to distance herself from Obama, opting instead for a girl-power, Hillary-backed ‘Clinton Democrat’ (whatever that actually means) veneer. A bit long in the tooth. It got her nowhere. Her only USP for a conservative Kentucky campaign seemed to, “Hey, over here – look! Not all liberals are afraid of guns”. Right message, wrong party.
In Bill’s home state of Arkansas, Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor was sent packing by Tom Cotton (R), an Iraq combat veteran and Harvard Law School graduate, leaving draft-dodging dodgy lawyer Bill way out of his depth.
Beyond the midterms, the results signaled a clear dynastic defeat for ‘Brand Clinton’. The concept of a ‘Clinton Democrat’ is fading almost as fast as Bill’s star power, but not as fast as the stain on a certain intern’s dress. Being upstaged by Monica Lewinsky this fall hasn’t helped the Clinton 2016 media machine either. American’s are tired of 20th century political dynasties, and Hillary will have to work a lot harder for her poll position than previously thought.
NIP AND TUCK: Harris Faulkner makes Michelle Obama look like a feline kitten.
Media Horror Show
FOX’s ‘Outnumbered’, essentially, four infomercial spokesmodels, led by 50-something masculine femme-bot, Harris Faulkner, all masquerading as Roger Ailes’s Palm Springs version of a right-wing minority rainbow – one black, one white, one Latino, and one Italian/Greek – with 3 out of the four having either their eyes pinned-back, a nose job, or filed down chin/jaw. Sitting in the middle is always an effeminate male, in this case, Tucker Carlson, and together, they all basked in glory by getting overly caddy about their midterm romp. “Our team won! Oh, and I love your nails!”
There is something oddly eery about FOX’s fatal femmes these days. Reel Girl explains, “Fox News is a modern day Stepford factory for accomplished women. By turning professors and authors into porn star doppelgangers, the network effectively communicates what women say is not as important how they appear.”
When the Right Gets Nasty
There is a level of divisiveness in American politics today, one which we’ve never seen before. Some of us have a long memory however. I remember being shouted-down and accused of being unpatriotic by Bush’s faithful in 2003 for opposing the WMD war in Iraq, much the same as being accused of being a ‘racist’ if one dared oppose the will or policy of Obama from 2008. What it proves is that both parties and their media hooligans, become very nasty when they feel they have a lock on power. Looking at the FOX faithful should give you a clue as to what’s in store.
If the Republicans win the White House in 2016, and keep the House, then the default position will be a hard right turn, in other words, political fascism will become fashionable – a fitting complement to economic fascism put into place by successive Repub and Demo’s governments.
MSNBC’s ‘CHRIS MADDOW’: Are Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow the same person?
MSNBC: fading Fast
Equally disturbing – for it’s unimpressive and their invisible Nielsen audience, was the MSNBC election coverage. Like Obama, MSNBC was mostly in denial, pretending that nothing has happened and that MSNBC was still relevant in terms of its political influence in America.
If the midterms were anything, they were proof that MSNBC – the White House’s own private network, is officially the toilet bowl of broadcast journalism.
What’s to Expect Towards 2016?
Obama the tired old adage, extolling the virtues of crazy McCain’s alleged old forte, “reaching across the aisle…”. Hardly.
Obama, like any two term lame duck, will become increasingly obsessed with his legacy. In the context of traditional American politics, such a direct threat makes a National Socialist Hitler seem like a flaky hippie. Obama wants to push through ‘Universal Amnesty’ for all illegal (or undocumented) Latinos in the US, just in time for Christmas, canonising him St. Barack of Chicago – the man who created 20 million new Democratic voters with the stroke of a pen. A true miracle. But it will also trigger a PR backlash like the country has never seen, making the next two years a brutal partisan gang war. Let’s hope it doesn’t spill into the streets. With no spare money for tattoos and Starbucks, you can expect the Left to unleash their under-employed Occupy flash mobs by Fall of 2015.
The “Secure Our Borders” issue is still a dead end. The US has always been built on immigration, and always will be. It’s a comic book creation driven by FOX, Savage and others, because you cannot hermetically seal the USA. The problem is overwhelmingly one of Mexico’s doing, and not America’s. Don’t tell that to the rank-and-file Tea Partiers. You can hear the tragic battle cry, “Send the National Guard to the border and shoot anyone who comes across – they could be ISIS carrying Ebola!”. Wonderful.
Ditto with the tired old cry for a “Keystone Pipeline!” (nearly as shallow as “drill baby drill!”). Again, another issue that has more to do with another country than it does the US. Republicans fail to realise that the Keystone project is for Canadian Tar Sands Oil which come from Canada, as opposed to US oil which is from… the US. “But it will create jobs!” they still say. Maybe a few jobs for a year or two. Either way – it’s a non-issue reserved for political dummies who have run out of sound bites.
Obamacare was another killer. No matter how much the President talks it up, and claims that, “Millions of more Americans are registered with healthcare as a result of my bill”, the reality is much different – and Americans know it. Out-of-pocket deductibles are more expensive now, overall premiums are way up and the truth – less people have health insurance than ever before. Last year’s Republican House could have killed it by defunding it, but Speaker Boehner bottled it (no pun intended) because The Right are also dancing the same shameless corporate jig. All Obamacare did was prove the political and economic postulate that whenever government imposes itself on any market, it creates an artificial inflation in that market. The only beneficiaries are the cartel of insurance companies who now have the government enforcement behind them to make sure that everyone buys their product – or else. No wonder then that it was the health insurers who actually wrote the Obamacare bill.
MCCAIN: Permanently out to lunch, but less time to play video poker on his iPhone..
More Wars. With his mental stability still in question, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has been given the war reins, now head of Senate Arms Services Committee, an upgrade to his present role as an embed for the Military industrial Complex inside Congress – a sales reps for arms defense contractors. As committee chairman, crazy McCain would have less time to play video poker (image, above) an influential role in spearheading defense policy from Capitol Hill. The National Journal adds here, “That includes the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual bill that outlines defense policy and tells the Pentagon what it can and can’t spend money on. He’ll also gain a megaphone to voice his frequent opposition to the Obama administration on military and national security issues”.
By spring, McCain will certainly be calling for $1 billion more in aid and more US boots on the ground to help his imaginary “moderate rebels” in Syria, and will call for more tough NATO posturing and sanctions against Russia, as well as an opening salvo against Iran. Plenty of war options there.
You can hear the clinging of Kosher wine glasses in Tel Aviv, and K Street. The War Hawks are in again, and the Israelis happy. They’ll be even happier if Jeb Bush manages to repeat his older brother’s performance in 2000 – that is, win his home state/swing state (aka ‘God’s Waiting Room’) in Florida, and grab control of the White House and the world again.
What’s more frustrating is that on issues that really mean something to Americans – like NSA spying and gov’t theft of data – both parties Democrat and Republic, share exactly the same closed stance: less privacy rights, more spying and absolutely no apologies from the federal government. Another perfect example of one party: The Federal Government.
THE $30K SMILE: McConnell’s wife could land a job on FOX.
But Can They Govern?
GOP leaders are said to be crafting a new agenda to show that their party can actually govern. Mitch McConnell and still speaker, John A. Boehner (R-OH) are claiming to have locked themselves in a fully stocked bar somewhere in DC, where they are quietly laying plans for a series of “quick votes” sometime in January, designed to pass some “stalled legislation”…
No one is holding their breath, not even Mxxxxx.
READ MORE OBAMA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Obama Files
