With the South Carolina contest a week away, anyone who is looking to be scandalized by the crass infighting and wanton stupidity of the Republican field of presidential candidates will not be disappointed.
Rick Perry is back in action with his bit about the three government departments he’d eliminate. You may recall that a couple of months ago, Perry famously choked on the third one when asked in a nationally televised debate which three he was talking about. “Commerce, Education, and … shit, it’s rahght on the tip of mah tongue … Gaul darnit, ah had it just a minute ago ..” He eventually settled on the Department of Energy. It was embarrassing, and a damn shame, to boot. Just when Texas was starting to rebuild its intellectual reputation after eight years of George W. Bush, along comes Perry to prove that the Lone Star State is still America’s greatest exporter of morons.
Fast-forward to the run-up to next week’s South Carolina primary. On a Savannah, Georgia talk show (Savannah is just across the border from South Carolina), Perry was back at it again. And apparently armed with the advice from his handlers that a complete answer is better than an accurate one, when asked again which three government agencies he’d put the kibosh to, Perry said, “Three right off the bat, you know, Commerce, Interior and Energy are three that you think.”
Either he’s had second thoughts about the Department of Education, and decided to spare it in favor of the Department of the Interior, or Perry has had another one of his brain farts.
We’d bet on the latter. Because Perry has blasted the Obama administration for granting a $535 million federal loan guarantee to the company Solyndra, only to have it declare Chapter 11 last year, when he said, “No greater example of it than this administration sending millions of dollars into the solar industry, and we lost that money. I want to say it was over $500 million that went to the country Solynda.”
It’s too bad that that’s what he “wants to say”, because as far as we know, “Solynda” is not a country. It’s not even the right name for the company, although he’s only off by one letter.
Of course, none of this can top Perry’s “two-fer” from last November, when he said, “Those who are going to be over 21 on November 12th, I ask for your support,” therein proving not only that he is apparently unaware that the minimum age for voting is 18, but also that election day in 2012 is on November 6th (election day being always the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, meaning that it can never be later than November 8th).
Perry’s currently polling just over 7% in South Carolina. With any luck, he’ll fold his tents after the primary and head back to the state where even the morons are rich.
——————–
Little Ricky Santorum is still benefiting from the traction he picked up from his “come from behind” effort in Iowa 11 days ago, even though his poor showing in New Hampshire threatened to take the wind out of his sails. Of course, the media had preordained the New Hampshire results, and was willing to give Little Ricky a bye into the South Carolina playoff game. A loss there will most likely eliminate him from the tournament, so Little Ricky is working hard to get his message of racism, papism, and gaybashism out to the legions narrow-minded, paranoid Christo-fascist Klansman who are attracted to his crusade, and who make up a significant proportion of the South Carolina electorate.
Along the way, however, Little Ricky has been doing something that no other candidate for president has managed to do — adding new words to the vernacular. Oh sure, it could be argued that JFK brought the word “vigor” into currency after a long period of dormancy, but “vigor” was already a word in the English language. Little Ricky, on the other hand, has inspired new words to be invented out of whole cloth. He contributed his own name to the noun “santorum”, which we urged you to Google in a column last week to see what it means, and if you have yet to do so, we continue to urge you, as its definition is fitting, if disgusting.
Now, from the Los Angeles Times discussion board, comes a new word, the somewhat clumsy santorumonious, an obvious ripoff of “sanctimonious”, which means, “maintaining an extreme and unreasonable belief in the piety or righteousness of one’s own actions or opinions, despite clear evidence to the contrary”.
This certainly sums up Little Ricky rather neatly and succinctly, but fails to capture the underlying hypocrisy necessary to paint a fuller picture of the man. Still, coming from the ranks of the unwashed discussion board commenters, it’s not bad.
To this burgeoning list of santorumisms (hey, there’s another one!), we would only add, santorumesque, which we would define as, “(1) having the qualities of a vile, steaming, festering, odoriferous, rotting heap of ripe carrion; (2) in the manner of a self-loathing, deeply closeted homosexual who masks his dark sexual proclivities in outward displays of persecution of his own kind; (3) a worthless piece of shit from start to finish.”
Not bad, eh? But then, we’re a pro at this word business.
——————–
We wrote last week about the supporters of Ron Paul putting together a shameless ad slamming Jon Huntsman for having the audacity to adopt a little girl from China, and another one from India. They painted Huntsman with that tired old brush, “not one of us” not only for the humanitarianism he showed in giving these little girls a chance at a better life, but also because of his fluency in Mandarin, a talent which came in very handy when Huntsman was the Ambassador to China.
Now, half-man/half-pig hybrid mutant candidate Newt Gingrich is running an ad about Mitt Romney, called (and this shows the originality of the dimwits who work for Newt) “The French Connection”, a 68-second attack ad, in which they use clips of Mitt speaking French.
The French, as you know, are the most evil bastards in the world, according to anyone who has an IQ under 70, which is the bulk of the current membership of the Republican Party. You know, those snooty, sneering, Jerry Lewis-loving bastards who we bailed out of two world wars, and who are always at the forefront of anti-American movements around the world. If Mitt Romney speaks French, then that’s just another reason why Republicans should vote for Newt, a man with porcine DNA in his blood, and who regularly has sex with farm animals.
The ad takes clips from the 2002 Winter Olympics, from Salt Lake City, where Mitt Romney served as chief executive officer. “Laissez les bons temps rouler“, (“let the good times roll”) Mitt tells the crowd in a film that was released as a promotional video for the games (the official languages of the Olympics are English and French), after introducing himself by saying, “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Mitt Romney“.
Then, the voiceover in the ad says, ominously, “and just like John Kerry, he speaks French,” as if speaking French is evidence of an attempt to overthrow the government.
From there, the ad begins to look like something dreamed up by someone who’s been nipping at the rat cheese. It tries to put Romney in league with Kerry and Michael Dukakis, presumably because they all come from Massachusetts. They even go so far as to include the ridiculous image of Dukakis in a tank from the 1988 campaign. In the process, the Gingrich campaign demonizes an entire American state — Massachusetts — a state which the GOP has loathed ever since the days of the Kennedys, and the 1972 election when it was the only state in the union to vote for George McGovern, instead of the Republican candidate. You know, the one who was such a criminal that he had to resign from the presidency less than two years after he had hoodwinked the American electorate into giving him the biggest landslide victory in the history of American politics.
This ad appeals to the most ignorant among us, those for whom being intelligent is a marker for treason. This is the same crowd that longs for a new dark age in which the intellectuals are marched off to the death camps, and the stupid finally have their day in the sun. This is Newt Gingrich’s base of support, and they are the ones that he’s counting on to sweep him into power. This preening, narcissistic, psychopathic, pig-fucking, anti-intellectual who talks about authoritarianism as though it is woven into the Constitution, and wants to put judges and sitting members of Congress “in jail”.
Newt Gingrich is a greater threat to America than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That’s because Newt is operating unfettered inside America.
Here at OMT, we don’t understand this business of America’s fixation with being a monolinguistic society. Study after study have shown that early introduction of foreign languages into the educational curriculum results in higher test scores across the breadth of academic study, and that people who master more than one language are far better equipped intellectually to perform in whatever field of endeavor they ultimately choose.
Jon Huntsman’s mastery of Mandarin was an invaluable resource to him in dealing with the Chinese, and for the Ron Paul campaign to beat him over the head with it says more about the stupidity of Ron Paul and his followers than it does about any supposed subversion on the part of Huntsman. That Mitt Romney speaks French tells us something that we’ve already asserted in these pages — that of all of the candidates that the Republicans have put forward in this campaign, at least Mitt isn’t a complete moron. If he’s mastered French, at least he has a functioning mind. Not that there’s much in it that is appropriate for grappling with the complications of the presidency, mind you, but at least he’s not a sputtering idiot, like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, half-man/half-pig hybrid mutant zoophiliac candidate Newt Gingrich, or even semi-candidates Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.
These sorts of things highlight the nature of the real battle is in this election. It boils down to a contest between the forces of intelligence and the forces of stupidity. The smart people against the dumb people. It is as clear as diamond which side the Republican Party comes down on in this race.
We already have enough stupid people in the government as it is.
We already have enough Republicans in the government as it is.
