Our Long National Nightmare

The light at the end of the tunnel of America’s two-year presidential election orgy is shining brightly and clearly from where we sit this morning, and we think that we’re likely not the only one who is feeling a sense of relief that one of the most wrenching, anti-democratic, embarrassing, divisive, ineffective, and hate-filled spectacles in modern politics is finally coming to a long-overdue close.

The rampant and abject failures in every single institution in America — from the government, to the courts, to the media, to business, to the financial sector, to the people themselves — have been on vivid display, for all the world to see, making a mockery of the principles of representative government once deemed so important that hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans laid down their lives — from Lexington and Concord, to Basra and Takrit — in their defense.

What we have witnessed over the course of the past two years is not worth defending in these pages, let alone on the battlefield. America’s precipitous decline in every virtually metric imaginable — a process unleashed 30 years ago with the election of St. Ronnie of Bonzo — has only accelerated with Misterogers’ generation of unempathetic narcissists coming online in the political process, bringing along with them the fascism that will ultimately be this country’s undoing.

With our electoral system awash in unimaginable sums of billionaire cash — a catastrophe of pollution on a par with the BP oil spill of a few years back — with voting laws in many states that disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters all to prevent a perceived threat which has never materialized, and with millions of voting machines all over the country under the control of a single corporation — a corporation whose CEO is deep in the pockets of the tea party radicals — one can be forgiven if one comes to the conclusion that it isn’t even worth voting anymore, since the fix is in.

We believe that President Obama will win the presidential election, of course, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Although the Democrats will likely make gains in the Senate (primarily because the GOP has nominated a number of white male Senate candidates who believe that the rape of a woman is a “gift from God”), it is unlikely that they will get the 25 seats required for a Democratic majority in the House, which means that we will be in for four more years of gridlock, as the GOP doubles down on digging in its heels in order to ensure that “this president fail”.

And for this, we blame the people. After eight years with the Republicans in power, America was on the verge of economic collapse in 2008, what with trillions spent on unnecessary wars, those infamous tax cuts for the rich, and the veritable elimination of all forms of regulation on the finance industry. Upon assuming office in January of 2009, President Obama was handed arguably the biggest unholy mess that was ever handed to an incoming president by the Republicans, with the possible exception of the unholy mess that the GOP handed to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The griping about President Obama not moving fast enough started almost immediately, with, astonishingly, many of the people leading the charge being from the left. Anyone who is laboring under the delusion that any president, let alone a president beleaguered by an opposition accusing him of being everything from a “Kenyan-born, anti-colonialist, socialist” to a “Manchurian candidate who favors death panels for grandma” can reverse an economic trajectory that was 30 years in the making, needs to grow the fuck up.

But even in the face of all of that, President Obama managed to revive the American auto industry, saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. The stimulus package created many thousands more, improving our roads, bridges, schools (saving 300,000 education jobs in the process), and other infrastructure, and helped thousands of people stay in their homes and stave off foreclosure. All of this, mind you, was pretty much under the radar of the media, although we understand that the media’s radar has been on the fritz for some time now.

Oh, and by the way, the Down Jones Industrial average was 6,626.94 on March 2, 2009, six weeks after President Obama was sworn in. Last Friday, it closed at 13,093.16.

Not a single time was that particular metric mentioned by anyone in the two years that this presidential campaign has been underway.

These are just the highlights, of course. That he managed to do anything at all with a Republican opposition whose stated goal at the outset was not “to help the American people”, or “to work with this president for the good of the country”, but instead to make sure “that this president fail”, is all the more remarkable.

Why anyone would possibly want to give the reigns of power back to the very people who brought this country to the brink of economic collapse — Mitt Romney being cast from the same defective mold that produced all of the major players in the 2008 financial crisis — is beyond us entirely, and speaks very clearly to both the outrageous stupidity and self-delusion of the average American voter, and the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda machine, led by Fox (ahem) News, and abetted by the nattering morons of talk radio.

History teaches us that no one has ever lost a dime betting on the stupidity of the average American, and that was in the days when we were in the hands of a generation that was still capable of achievement. Since those heady days of moon shots and social safety nets, America has made the decision to sit out the 21st century, abandoning the leadership of the planet to those well-known humanitarians, the Chinese, while we focus instead on ourselves, our celebrities, our pharmaceuticals, and our electronic gizmos, indulging ourselves in our God fetish, and ransacking the curricula in our schools, replacing science with idiot theology. Meanwhile, the Chinese are cranking out the doctors, engineers, mathematicians, and other professionals that will likely solve the planet’s energy and environmental crises while America devolves into a xenophobic fascist dictatorship with death camps for liberals and too many weapons of mass destruction.

The people who are betting on that stupidity are the very same people who are unleashing the billions that have made this election cycle the monument to failed states that it has been. They keep pissing into America’s ear and telling them that it’s raining, and America rushes to buy up all of the umbrellas.

They wail about “voter fraud” when the only people perpetrating a voter fraud upon the American people are the Republicans.

They tell us that President Obama is a socialist (or a fascist, or whatever) who has apparently declared a “war on coal”, who has put America “500 trillion dollars” in debt, when it is the GOP that has fascist designs upon America, who has declared a war on democracy, and will, if given the reigns of power, actually achieve half a quadrillion dollars in debt for this nation if given half a chance.

But the American people, like starving children, gobble up all of the lies and innuendo, putting their trust in the very people who are fucking them up the ass, and seeming to love the incessant pounding on their bottoms.

If, as Joseph de Maistre observed 200 years ago, “Every nation gets the government it deserves,” then it speaks volumes about America that what is unfolding in this country today constitutes what its populace deserves.

It’s appalling, to be sure. Although not so appalling as the fact that America is going down the path to tyranny with its eyes wide open.

We’re not going to tell you to vote Democratic.

But we will tell you to vote against the Republicans.

If that means voting for a Democrat, so be it.