Because unlike people like Boz Scaggs, Cindi Lauper, and Rod Stewart, all of whom have done standards albums recently, only Paul McCartney truly has this kind of music in his blood. He wrote “When I’m 64″ when he was 16, and kept it in his back pocket until The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Honey Pie”, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, and even “Yesterday” would probably have been just as popular, or perhaps even more so, had Paul been around in the 1930s to record them on scratchy 78s. Indeed, had he been born a generation earlier, we think that Paul McCartney would have given Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin a serious run for their money.

The great irony, of course, is that more than anyone else The Beatles were responsible for sweeping this kind of music out of the ears of the listening public at large in favor of the guitar-based, beat-heavy music that has taken a stranglehold on musical taste since the middle of the last century. By doing an album of standards this late in his career, Paul McCartney is closing his musical circle very neatly, and in ways that no other rock musician can.

Paul McCartney - Kisses on the Bottom

The title, “Kisses on the Bottom” is taken from a line in the first song on the record, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter”, first made famous by Fats Waller in 1935. Paul has recorded 12 standards on this album, and has even composed two new originals. Among the songs are, “Home (When Shadows Fall)”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, “The Glory of Love”, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”, “Bye-Bye Blackbird”, “Get Yourself Another Fool”, “Inch Worm”, and “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)”.

Ordinarily, we take a dim view of rock stars who try to redefine themselves as crooners late in their careers. For us, this was certainly true with Rod Stewart, although we have to admit that we never had much use for him, even back in the 70s at the height of his popularity.

But this is Paul McCartney, after all. This is a Beatle. And on top of that, this is the Beatle who is most suited to mounting this kind of effort. And he does not disappoint.

Key to what makes this record work where so many others didn’t is the overall simplicity of the arrangements. Paul has turned over the production of the album to the capable hands of veteran producer Tommy LiPuma, who over the years has worked with such artists as Miles Davis, Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand, The Yellowjackets, Michael Franks, and Diana Krall. LiPuma even brought in Krall and her trio to act as the backup band, thus giving Paul his first opportunity to work within a jazz setting. And given the way he acquits himself, it’s clear that he’s been holding out on us. By this time, Paul’s voice has acquired the requisite smokiness that fits these songs so well. He’s not crooning here, as one might expect, but instead delivers the vocals in almost a whisper, which still conveys enormous expressiveness. Augmented by Jonny Mandel’s light hand with the strings, the record is an understated masterpiece, a nod to the earliest influences of one of the greatest songwriters of the second half of the 20th century.

The two McCartney originals, “My Valentine”, and “Only Our Hearts” fit seamlessly into the tapestry of the album, virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the material, which proves beyond argument that this kind of music is second nature for Paul. While “Only Our Hearts” is an unabashedly “silly love song” for which Paul is so famous, “My Valentine” is something else altogether. If we still lived in an age in which songs were capable of reaching across wide swaths of music lovers, as they were in the days before everything became so fragmented, we would not be surprised in the least if “My Valentine” joined the ranks of the other songs on this album to become a standard in its own right.

As one might expect, Paul gets a little help from his friends along the way. In addition to Diana Krall and her band playing throughout, Stevie Wonder shows up to play harmonica on “Only Our Hearts”, proving that in addition to everything else he’s achieved in his career, he’s the heir to the mantle of the great Toots Thielemans. Eric Clapton plays guitar on two tracks, “My Valentine”, and a warm, buttery solo on “Get Yourself Another Fool”, which has us thinking that “Old Slowhand” has a jazz album lurking inside him somewhere, scratching at the door to get out. It’s a record we wouldn’t mind hearing.

Paul has said in an interview that this is an album he’s always wanted to do with The Beatles, because both he and John Lennon were heavily influenced by this kind of music early in their lives. While we have a hard time imagining the Fab Four performing these tracks, Paul pulls it all off quite nicely all by himself.

We didn’t expect to like this record, of course, because we generally don’t like it when rock artists do this sort of thing.

But this is Paul McCartney.

And he is, after all, the Beatle that we still have.

He’s earned this one, and he’s done it the only way a Beatle knows how — with style and class.

And with the talent to back it all up.

We’re getting bored.

And who would have thought it? Who would have suggested that a freak show of the proportions of the Republican presidential race would become boring, predictable, and, well, tiresome? Certainly not us. With a lineup of whack jobs of the caliber of this slate of candidates, we thought that there would be enough to spur our interest all the way to the convention in August, if need be.

And yet, here we are at the start of February, with Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and now Florida in the rear view mirror, and this race has degenerated into a hissy little name-calling fest between the inevitable nominee Mitt Romney and delusional, pompous, erratic, undisciplined, angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband, all-around überhypocrite, fuck-wad of the first order, freshly-minted self-styled anti-Castro zealot, staggeringly unstable, natural-born liar, emotionally bankrupt, and now increasingly pathetic, rapidly fading, and desperate Newt Gingrich, with Little Ricky Santorum and Ron Paul fighting it out for what is considered to be the fringe vote in a process in which what would normally be considered to be fringe has gone mainstream.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”, Hunter Thompson once memorably said. If he’d lived to see what has gone down in the past year in presidential politics, he’s probably still have eaten his gun.

Last night in Florida, Romney came in first, as predicted with 46.4% (771,842), Gingrich 31.9% (531,294), Santorum 13.4% (222,248), and Paul 7.0% (116,776). No surprise there. But in a state with a 2011 estimated population of 19,057,542 and only 1,642,160 participating in the primary (less than 10% of the population), it begs the question, who’s selecting our candidates, anyway? Sure, only Republicans participated, but if Florida Republican voters represent less than 10% of the population of the state, how do we explain Bush v. Gore in 2000?

The reality is that this race has settled into a predictable pattern that compels all of us to ignore it and go off into other things. Even in Florida, a large and diverse state in which the candidates (Romney especially) spent millions to get out the vote, most Republicans stayed home. At $15 million spent in the Sunshine State, Romney ended up spending $19.43 for every vote he won in last night’s primary, a price kept that high because most voters just couldn’t be bothered. A lot of them have been turned off because of the tenor of the race. But most people are just bored with the entire proceedings. The outcome has been in the cards for some time now. In the coming weeks, sure, Gingrich will have his moments, but unless something unforeseen occurs, Romney has this nomination in the bag, and we can do without all of the inter-candidate sniping, name-calling, accusations, and mud-hurling in the interim.

But before we take a much-needed break from presidential politics, we just have to take a minute and ante up our two cents about Mitt’s dog problem. And as dogs figured heavily into yesterday’s post, you can think of this as our way of stressing continuity of subject matter.

Or not.

For those of you who may not be up on Romney’s canine crisis, we can tell you that among its more bizarre features is that it has made strange bedfellows of Newt Gingrich and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Although how “strange” is relative, given Gingrich’s well-known carnal lust for members of other species.

Nevertheless, in what has been dubbed “Crate-gate”, Mitt has been on the receiving end of sharp criticism from PETA, and lately from Gingrich for an episode dating back to 1983, when the Romney family made one of their annual treks from Boston to Ontario on vacation. This was apparently before Romney became a job-creator, as the family made the trip in a Chevy “woodie” station wagon, one of those hideous, low-slung behemoths that GM specialized in before Chrysler changed the game with the introduction of the first mini-van. As a well-known gazillionaire, today Mitt wouldn’t be caught dead in a Chevy station wagon.

At that time, the Romneys had an Irish Setter, which they named Seamus. As anyone familiar with the breed will tell you, Setters are an energetic, nervous, skittish animal, hardly what we would call a house dog. We had a friend once who had an efficiency apartment in which he lived with two Irish Setters, which much later we recognized as an early sign of his oncoming madness.

The Romneys filled the station wagon to capacity with kids, suitcases, and other necessities for the 12-hour trip. When it came to finding a place for Seamus, Mitt decided that the thing to do would be to put the dog in a carrier, and strap the carrier to the roof of the car. He even fashioned a crude wind shield for the crate to make the trip more “comfortable” for the dog. This kind of hands-on, “do-it-yourselfer” quality of Mitt’s came as a complete surprise to us, as it might to you as well.

Once secured on the roof, the Romneys set off on their 12-hour trip to the Great White North, gaily singing songs, we would imagine, with Seamus left to his own devices. Mitt planned to make stops for gas and, presumably, bathroom breaks, but that was it. The trip was going to be a straight through run all the way to their destination.

The Boston Globe reported about all of this back in 2007, in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Romney tried and failed to get the nomination. They were doing what they thought was a pro-Romney piece at the time, but had apparently misjudged their readers.

Along the way, Mitt’s son Tagg (where do these people get these names?) looked out the back of the car and noticed something “icky”. The Boston Globe takes it from here:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

The Globe reported that Mitt “coolly” pulled over to a gas station (whether or not it was the nearest gas station is unknown), where he “borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway”, with Seamus still strapped onto the roof of the car. It’s not clear whether or not Mitt took the carrier down and let Seamus out for a stretch while he was hosing down the car, or if he just left everything (including Seamus) strapped up there while he cleaned up the mess. Considering what he’d been through (and what he was yet to endure) Seamus must have been racking his brain trying to pin down exactly what bad behavior he’d engaged in to deserve such treatment so that he could make absolutely sure he’d never do it again.

The Globe, for their part, used this incident as an illustration of Mitt’s “emotion-free crisis management”.

PETA has been at the front lines of this crisis, as one might well expect. But joining them hand-in-paw is well known animal lover (in the biblical sense) Newt Gingrich. In his zeal, not to mention his desperation, to smear Mitt Romney at any cost, at any burden, Newt has unearthed this 1983 incident and has run with it like a looter with a flat-panel display. Taking a page from the Dan Savage notebook, Gingrich is even attempting to plant a “Google bomb” against Mitt, in which he coins the term “romney” as “to defecate in terror”.

Of course, this all speaks to our growing boredom with this entire race, as we now have a front-runner who puts dogs through a 12-hour torture session, and his chief rival who responds with infantile scatological pranks.

We remind you that both of these individuals fancy themselves qualified to be President of the United States.

It’s no wonder that so few Floridians bothered to show up to vote for them.

This presidential race has degenerated into something that is so far beneath contempt that the language simply fails us in our feeble attempts to describe it.

For all of the terrible things we have said about Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, and Romney over the course of the past few months, none of it is as terrible, none so shameful, as the words and actions of these men themselves.

A system of government which allows for, and even seems to encourage, the devolution of its presidential selection process to such primitive levels is a system of government which requires considerable and, we would argue, very serious reevaluation. It’s no wonder that democracy has been suffering setbacks in recent years around the world, when the country that is supposed to be the beacon of democracy, the example to which all nascent democracies look to show the way, has degenerated into a carny sideshow of epic proportions, driven my a media that has lost all sense of proportion, abetted by free and unfettered influxes of obscene amounts of cash from all manner of powerful special interests, that makes a mockery of the concept of government of, by and for the people.

We are all Seamus, strapped to the roof of a system of government careening out of control. And when it scares the shit out of us, we can expect to be hosed down where we stand, by “emotion-free” politicians, practicing “crisis management”, before the whole things starts up again and keeps on going until we reach whatever unAmerican destination they have in mind for us, wondering what we might have done that was so terrible that we are being subjected to this kind of treatment.

Both Mitt Romney and his wife have said that Seamus had fun in Canada, and that he went on to live with the Romneys for many years. Mitt dismissed the whole brouhaha, saying that “PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air”.

But one of Mitt’s sons told a reporter that as soon as they arrived in Ontario, Seamus took off and was never seen again.

We hope he found a nice Canadian family and lived out a good life.

The rest of us may not be so lucky.

Gary Hesterberg had taken his two small dogs to Rancho Corral de Tierra this past Sunday afternoon, letting them run loose, when he was approached by an unidentified female park ranger, who asked him for identification. Hesterberg, who had left his wallet at home, had none with him, and started to walk away. The ranger demanded that he stay at the scene, and after following him for a few feet, decided to “deploy” her taser, zapping Hesterberg in the back, and bringing him to the ground.

The officer later claimed that Hesterberg had given her a false name, which is why she felt compelled to “deploy” her weapon. She said that when paramedics arrived, Hesterberg gave his correct name. How she was able to verify all of this in the absence of Hesterberg’s wallet remains a mystery. Interestingly, none of the news reports about the incident reveal the ranger’s identification.

Once the paramedics got Hesterberg back on his feet again, he was arrested “on suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order, having dogs off-leash and knowingly providing false information”.

Well, we weren’t there, of course, but of the three charges levied against Hesterberg, the only one that comes up to being supported by any kind of credible evidence is “having dogs off-leash”. The “knowingly providing false information” business is just a matter of he-said/she-said, since the only people who really know the truth there are the two of them. And as for “suspicion of failing to obey a lawful order”, either he failed to obey or he didn’t. How can she “suspect” whether or not he obeyed? She was there, wasn’t she? Are we arresting people now when we’re not sure whether they broke the law or not? We can understand this when it’s suspicion of murder, or of some other legitimate crime. But for “failing to obey a lawful order”, when the arresting officer can’t say for sure whether or not the suspect obeyed or not? If we start arresting people because the arresting officer is stupid, then we’d better start building more jails, because there’s going to be a tsunami of new skels coming into the system.

So, in the final analysis, Hesterberg’s only legitimate violation is for the off-leash offense, and for this he’s arrested. Hasn’t this ranger ever heard about writing out a citation?

Now, here in the city of Pittsburgh, we have leash laws on the books (up to a $350 fine, and 30 days in jail) for our city parks, and few things rile our ass more than these bastards who think that they have special dispensation from the city for their precious little mutts to run free shitting on the trails, chasing joggers, and running up to and threatening people who are only out trying to enjoy the park. On weekends, certain sections of Frick Park are overrun with dogs, and virtually unusable for any other purpose. So, on one level, we can understand where this cop is coming from.

But c’mon now. Zapping a guy for walking his dogs off-leash in an area which up until a month ago had been specially designated as an off-leash area? How does this rise up to the point where that kind of force is required? What kind of training are these rangers getting? They’re being issued weapons that can stun, and in some cases even kill people, and they’re apparently not being taught how to determine when and how to use them? It seems to us that someone simply walking away just doesn’t come up to the use of that kind of force. There was no threat to the ranger’s safety, Hesterberg did not have a weapon, hell, he didn’t even have his wallet. This sounds like the overreaction of a poorly-trained ranger, with so little experience and such bad judgment that she was obviously way beyond her depth in dealing with something even as routine as apprehending someone walking his dogs off-leash. She either needs to be sent back for retraining, or permanently relieved of her badge and her taser. We’d prefer the latter.

We’ve heard these stories before. The 96-year-old woman who was tasered in Florida when she became upset after a traffic accident. The man in a wheelchair at one of the Occupy protests who was repeatedly tasered, until he fell out of his chair and onto the sidewalk, when he was only trying to get out of the way of the advancing protesters, while one of the cops thought he was trying to flee. The eight-year-old boy who was misbehaving in class, and so the school called the cops, who tasered him to bring him under control. The pregnant woman who was nearly struck down in a crosswalk by a police car that was responding to a call, and was tasered when she went up to the cop as he was getting out of the car to give him a piece of her mind.

The taser has become a tool of convenience for cops today, something which lets them take complete command of any difficult or uncomfortable situation without actually having to be a human being. Its misuse is so widespread, so pervasive, and so easy that we can only expect these kinds of incidents to be on the increase, especially when we have a generation of cops coming online who have been raised watching reality television, and so don’t have clue one as to how to treat the general public in a reasoned, humane, and dignified manner.

The fact that it doesn’t kill outright, or at least doesn’t purport to, fixes in the minds of the cops the idea that it can be used wantonly, and in any situation, because, what’s the harm? Nobody’s going to actually die, unless you’re very, very unlucky.

Well, the harm is that you just might be very, very unlucky. As newer, more powerful tasers increase in their “take-down” power, the cardiovascular systems of more and more people are reacting to these jolts with sudden failure. Increasingly, the taser is becoming a lethal weapon, which flies in the face of the widespread notion among cops that, as weapons go, the taser is pretty innocuous.

Even that aside, though, it is a weapon, after all, lethal or not, and as such cops need to be trained in its use. And while they’re at it, cops should be getting training about how to defuse tense situations without resorting to some kind of weapon. Force — deadly or only potentially deadly — shouldn’t be the first club out of the bag when dealing with the average member of the public. There are other ways of persuading people to do your will. Human beings are capable of reason.

Or at least most of us are.

Jeb’s brother, former President Shit-for-Brains, has been sitting this campaign out, too, and has been telling everyone that he has no intention of getting involved. Which probably comes as a relief to all four current Republican contenders, who are painfully aware that the W’s eight years in the White House are viewed as an unmitigated catastrophe by even the most extreme elements within the Republican party, and want no connection with him whatsoever.

Not so with Jeb, though. There isn’t a one of these candidates who wouldn’t welcome an endorsement by Jeb Bush with open arms, and in the case of Gingrich, open legs. Of course, Newt won’t get one because to the Bushes, Gingrich is the American Saddam Hussein, and there are elements within the Bush family who would like to see Newt suffer the same fate as Saddam. It is on this one point which we here at OMT are in complete agreement with the Bushes. You’ll want to make a note of this, because it isn’t very likely that you’ll find us in agreement with the Bushes on anything else.

As for Paul and Santorum, well, they’re just whack-jobs and aren’t worth discussing, any more than they’re worth a Bush endorsement.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate. The one who, on paper at least, seems to be the most suitable in the bunch to qualify for a Bush endorsement.

And he’s gotten one, actually. The old man, George H. W., endorsed Mitt some time ago, while at the same time taking a shot at Newt Hussein by saying that at least Mitt isn’t “a bomb-thrower”. Hardly a ringing endorsement, if you ask us. Mitt, the object of a concerted “anybody but Romney” movement throughout the course of this campaign, gets one of his biggest endorsements from someone with an “anybody but Gingrich” agenda.

The bright side of the shabby way that the Republicans have been treating Mitt in this campaign is that it’s great training for the presidency, should Mitt manage to go all the way. Unlike President Obama, Mitt won’t be knocked off his feet by a hot kiss at the end of a wet fist when all of that overflowing love and support he enjoyed throughout the campaign suddenly evaporates into a cold fog, and all of those millions of people from all across America who seemed to love him just a short while ago, are outside the gates of the White House calling for his head. Never having known what it’s like to be loved, Mitt won’t miss it when it’s gone.

The way we see it, once Santorum drops out — which we think he will shortly after he comes in dead last in Florida — this is going to be a three-way race all the way to the convention. Newt may get his ass handed to him tomorrow in Florida, but there are plenty of other primaries to come with plenty of other opportunities for Newt to reach out with his message of bitterness and hatred to a Republican electorate teeming with both. And Ron Paul will remain the turtle in this race of jackrabbits, operating just underneath the radar of a media that would be well advised to upgrade to Doppler, gathering just enough delegates along the way to act as a spoiler at the convention, keeping both the hapless Mitt and the thinking man’s moron, Gingrich, just shy of the number of delegates needed to win on the first ballot.

After several more ballots in which no clear consensus is reached, the party will turn in its desperation to someone else, a fresh face, someone not tainted by this two-year campaign, someone who hasn’t squandered all of their dignity at freak-show debates, sniping with fringe crazies posing as presidential candidates. Someone who has a treasure-trove of love from within the ranks of the party faithful that he’s acquired over the years, and quietly managed to salt away, invest, and grow into a sizable nest-egg of good will. Someone who will now appear to be the savior of the party — nothing less than a Republican Jesus Christ. Someone who will be able to march into the convention like it was the Second Coming, and lead the party to victory in November, sweeping all of the faithful Republicans up in a cloud of glory, while all of the liberals, sodomites, Negros, Jews, and other undesirables are Left Behind to smite one another until St. Ronnie of Bonzo comes back at the right hand of the Almighty to bring an end to all of the evil in the world.

Someone like Jeb Bush.

And Jeb knows this. Knowing what he knows, would you endorse one of these worthless losers when you have everything to gain? When you might end up being the most powerful Bush who ever lived?

The old man was a weak wimp, who cried at the drop of a hat, and who threw up on the Japanese Prime Minister at a state dinner.

The brother was a stupid, classless, frat-boy and worthless piece of shit from start to finish.

But Jeb.

Now, Jeb could really be somebody.

Just when his party is teetering on the brink of disaster, Jeb could sweep in from the wings and save the day.

Of course, once anointed as party savior, this crowd would turn on him immediately. And there would be a lot of lingering resentment from all of those candidates who were out there for two years doing all of the heavy lifting in this campaign, only to be kicked to the gutter at the last minute in favor of one of those born-with-a-silver-foot-in-his-mouth Bushes. And even a Bush would likely not placate the legions of Ron Paul anarchists, or the seriously committed neo-Nazis and Klansmen within the ranks of the Republican party who want nothing less than total Armageddon, with blood running in the streets of our festering inner cities.

But all that aside, this could be Jeb’s year.

If it were us, we wouldn’t endorse anyone either.

And besides, we’ve already had two Bushes in the White House, and the world didn’t come to an end.

The third time just might be the charm.

Former Godfather’s Pizza magnate Herman Cain has given his official endorsement to Newt, just as front-runner Mitt Romney’s lead over Gingrich in the polls leading up to Tuesday’s Florida Primary has stretched to 11 percentage points. A condition which has to have Newt seeing those flashes out of the corners of his eyes that are the prelude one of his psychic breaks.

Cain, who partnered with Comedy Central’s Steven Colbert in the South Carolina primary in order to prove that there is no limit to how much of a fool one can make of oneself, had been holding back his endorsement, not that any of the remaining candidates were clamoring for it. Of all of the flares who shot up into the Republican firmament during the course of this campaign, aiming for that bright star at the heart of the Mitt constellation, Herman Cain’s gave the brightest and most impressive display as his o-rings gave way and he exploded, filling the sky with sparkling debris before plummeting to earth in a spectacular fireball. And that will likely remain the case until, like the final surge of rockets at the end of a fireworks show, Newt himself goes down in what we fully expect will make the London Blitz of 1940 look like the waning flickers of a votive candle in an old, drafty church.

Cain, the candidate we were least able to take seriously in a field awash with candidates we had a hard time picturing in the Oval Office, was such a terrible candidate that his very presence in this race gave Ron Paul enough gravitas, as the press likes to say, to actually make the libertarian Texas congressman and noted whack-job look just presidential enough to pass the sniff test for a lot of voters, a wave of momentum that Paul rides right up to this very day, and which may carry him all the way to November.

We think that this must be a key part of the grand strategy that the Republicans cooked up for this race. If they were to flood the field with certified idiots, morons, and psychopaths, then the least idiotic, moronic, and psychopathic among them just might end up appearing to be at least plausible as president. As a strategy, it’s a fine one, as it has made Mitt Romney seem to be the last sane man standing. In the reflected glow of this crowd, Mitt Romney comes off as reasoned, thoughtful, statesmanlike, eminently qualified, and fully up to the task of embracing the awesome responsibilities of the presidency. It is an assessment that falls apart like a house of cards upon close scrutiny, of course, but what does that matter in this race?

And now, as the field dwindles to a precious few, we are seeing the doubling down of the whack-jobs, with Cain’s endorsement of Gingrich. Surely this will give Romney that final push he’s been needing to pick up some real momentum.

We’re also apparently seeing a doubling down of the womanizers as well, since both Gingrich and Cain seem to have a view of the sanctity of marriage that is at some variance with that all-important Christo-fascist fundamentalist wing that guides the trajectory of the Republican party.

Cain, every bit as delusional as Gingrich, has probably convinced himself that Newt still has a chance to win the nomination. And if he does, he’s going to need a black man on the ticket to siphon off some of President Obama’s base of support. And who would be better to deliver the black vote en masse to the Republican party this fall than a man who’s blacker than Obama himself?

And also, since it’s well known that most men are serial womanizers, having the one-two punch of two sexual harassers on the Republican ticket will attract a tsunami of support from that silent majority of guys out there who sleep around on their wives, and who want somebody just like them running the affairs of this nation. Of all of the potential vice-presidential candidates available to Newt, only Herman Cain brings this kind of support potential to the table.

Viewed in this light, Cain’s endorsement makes perfect sense.

And making sense out of insanity is just another service that we provide for you, our readers, here at OMT.

It’s not an easy job, you know.

If Gingrich continues to slide, and given his weak performance in the most recent “debate”, we suspect that he will, Mitt Romney will emerge from Florida with some genuine chops to go with all of the hollow, presumptive “front runner” status he’s been coasting on for the bulk of this campaign.

And it’s about time, if you ask us. Apart from Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney has been the only candidate in this entire process who isn’t some kind of wigged-out, extremist, nut-job more suited for a talk radio studio than for the Oval Office. Indeed, it’s the very kind of unhinged, right-wing propaganda machine exemplified by talk radio and Fox (ahem) News that has created the climate in which a national political party can be hijacked by the kinds of forces that have so thoroughly infected the Republican Party, and which has diminished, if not outright obliterated, its legitimacy as a serious political entity.

For now, at least, they seem to be getting beaten back, as Romney finally appears to be getting some traction. And not a moment too soon.

But what a long, strange process it’s been. We’ve witnessed some things from these presidential aspirants in this campaign that make it virtually impossible to imagine that any one of them, including Romney, has the temperament or the intellect to competently act as the leader of what Fidel Castro calls “this globalized and expansive empire”. And while we would have preferred that President Obama face Gingrich in the general election, if for no other reason than we enjoy a good horror movie as much as the next person, we’ll be just as happy with Mitt, since we feel that the president will have no trouble beating his ass like a drum.

We’re just tired of a process that has been going on for over a year now whose ultimate outcome appears to be exactly the one that virtually anyone — inside or outside of politics, inside or outside of the beltway — could have predicted at the outset. And while the media has labored mightily to provide us with a bit of drama here and there to make us think that the eventual outcome might not be as clear as we thought — by anointing front-runner after front-runner, only to have them fall away like those poor saps in the Charge of the Light Brigade, and under similar circumstances — throughout it all, Romney stood his ground, never really falling back to less than second place, standing there, Rasputin-like, while everyone in the media and in his own party tired to roll him up in a carpet and toss him into the river.

If Mitt’s last-minute rise in the Florida polls translates into a decisive victory for him on Tuesday, then we think that his trajectory will be pretty well set. After all, we’re not the only ones who are getting tired of this entire process. We’re getting the sense that everyone just wants to get this damn thing over with so that we can focus on the general election, which really won’t get started until after Labor Day. That’s one of the problems of this continuous election cycle that the media has decided we need to have in order to preserve democracy. Eventually, people start to suffer from third-degree political burn-out.

And they end up going with their original instincts.

Which, in this case, for the Republicans, is Mitt Romney.

Not that there was ever any doubt in our mind.

Whew.

Before we continue, we feel that we simply must address the burgeoning adjective crisis that we have been struggling with in recent weeks when discussing Newt Gingrich. It all started out innocently enough. Back in 2010, we first broached the idea that Gingrich was a pig. Not figuratively, mind you, as one might expect from mainstream political analysis, but the genuine article. We offered what we felt was conclusive proof that Newt Gingrich actually has porcine DNA pumping through his body and from that point forward, for us, it simply became immutable fact.

In subsequent columns, we started referring to him as “half-man/half pig candidate Newt Gingrich”, a description which served us for quite some time. As his presidential quest began to gain momentum, however, we started embellishing this with other adjectives which, we felt, more fully and more accurately described this man. It also gave us something of a shorthand that we could use. By simply taking on more adjectives, we felt that we could present an efficient encapsulation of the man. A convenient way of both introducing him into whatever topic we happened to be writing about that particular day, as well as providing our readers with a succinct synopsis — a curriculum vitae, if you will — of Newt so that we wouldn’t have to re-hash all of the column inches we have already devoted to him, for those readers who may have missed our previous installments. As we have been picking up new readers recently, we found this in particular to be of no small importance.

Because of his being such a complex character, though, we found out in short order that additional information was required to paint a more accurate picture of Newt for our readers. As more and more of Newt’s personality quirks, disturbed behaviors, and psychic anomalies revealed themselves on the campaign trail, we found that we had to add more and more adjectives to properly flesh out the characterization that we were attempting to convey. Every time we sat down to write another column in which he figured, even in passing, it became apparent that something new had to be added in order to keep up with this silver-haired dynamo, who, with each passing day, each campaign appearance, each debate performance, seemed to reveal some new and appalling characteristic of his psyche, some terrible, dreadful, and hitherto unnoticed sign of his deeply depraved nature, some fresh indication of the loosening of his hold on reality, which we felt duty-bound to include in our ever-expanding thumbnail sketch of him.

But at some point a thumbnail sketch becomes a mural, and that is the dilemma we are facing now with Newt. We feel that now our efforts at efficiency have morphed into the exact opposite of our original intentions — a large, clumsy, unwieldy semi-paragraph which takes so long to slog through that by the time we have arrived at the man’s name, we have lost track of the thread of our thought. So we can only imagine what you, the reader, must be going through.

We will attempt to remedy this in the coming days, but until such time as we find a suitable alternative, we will continue using the current construct. One suggestion that came up at our weekly staff meeting yesterday was to simply drop the long list of adjectives altogether, and treat Newt in the same manner as we would any other Republican candidate, by using his name only, and with perhaps one or two simple adjectives. Like “Mormon milquetoast Mitt Romney”, for example. This was shouted down immediately, of course, but the matter is by no means closed. It is probably the most important editorial issue we are grappling with here at OMT at this time. We hope to have a resolution in the coming days and weeks.

But, we digress.

Now that it looks like he could actually win in Florida, Newt may have collared what George H. W. Bush used to like to call “big mo”, which may propel him through the rest of the primaries, giving him enough victories to clinch the nomination. We don’t think he will, of course, but we’ve been wrong about these kinds of things before, and so we think that it’s worth considering.

Most importantly, we think, is that if Newt’s run turns out to bear fruit, it will be the first time since 1964 that a major political party in this country has nominated a certifiably insane person to head up the ticket in a presidential election. That year it was Barry Goldwater, the granddaddy of all latter-day whack-job Republicans, who got deservedly trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the general election.

The same thing is likely to happen this year if Newt goes head-to-head with President Obama, of course. But there is always that ugly possibility that in a world in which a borderline psychotic like Newt Gingrich can convince enough people that he is fit for the presidency, that all bets are off, and that an Obama victory is not so foregone. In this nightmare scenario, America could wake up to an actual madman in the White House for the first time in our history.

While some historians have argued that Andrew Jackson was a first class wingnut, this is probably an exaggeration. And that crowd of moron Republicans between Grant and McKinley may make George W. Bush look positively statesmanlike, but nobody’s arguing that they were actually nuts. Well, maybe Rutherford B. Hayes, a real get-down-on-his-knees-and-pray teetotaling son of a bitch, who would be right at home running for the Republican nomination today, if he’d lose the beard.

As for George W. Bush himself, he may have been a dim-witted, classless frat boy, but it would be a stretch to call him “insane”. Ronald Reagan wasn’t all there, to be sure, but in his case it was early-onset Alzheimer’s, which is pretty scary considering his access to the nuclear codes. But it’s not the same thing as having someone creeping around the corridors of the White House who is actually functionally mad.

Nixon had his moments, of course. Like when he used to have those little chats with the portraits of previous presidents, or when he and Kissinger used to fall to their knees and pray. That stuff was all towards the end, though, when the wolves were scratching at Nixon’s door. We remember being in the Air Force during Watergate, in those days of early August 1974 leading up to Nixon’s resignation, when a special order came down the twix from the Pentagon to all military units worldwide, to the effect that any military order issued by Richard Nixon was to be approved first by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. It was, we’re pretty sure, unprecedented in US history that the orders of the commander-in-chief needed to be approved by one of his underlings before being carried out. And it had us all wondering whether or not Nixon had gone off the deep end. He was on a plane to exile in San Clemente, though, before that order had to be put to the test.

But Nixon’s madness came from his fall from a historic victory in November of 1972 to being driven from office 21 months later after a nationally televised crash and burn of epic proportions. He had been a carrier of madness all along, but it didn’t become acute until right before the end, and after a tremendous battering around by the press, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, and the American people. All of which was richly deserved, mind you. But, still …

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is whacko right out of the box. He hasn’t experienced any of the normal pressures of the office of the presidency yet, let alone the extraordinary ones that are sure to come his way should he be elected. And even absent those stresses, he’s been exhibiting numerous clear and unmistakable signs that he’s nuts. According to his ex-wife, he’s already had a serious mental breakdown when he was convicted of ethics violations and fined $300,000 that he didn’t have, and lost the speakership of the House. What’s going to happen when he’s president and the Iranians block the Strait of Hormuz? Or if North Korean troops storm across the demilitarized zone and into the south? Or when he is inevitably impeached by Congress for the high crimes and misdemeanors he’s sure to commit as president?

Or when he has an affair with a White House intern and lies about it, telling the Washington Press Corps, “I did not have sex with that woman, and I’m appalled that you would ask me that, and besides, Callista doesn’t care, so what’s the problem?”

With his well-known instability and erratic behavior, not to mention the unpredictable impact that porcine DNA likely has on his brain’s ability to rationally process emotions, how can any reasonable person consider Newt Gingrich to be fit for the awesome responsibilities of the office of President of the United States?

The man’s a pig. And an insane pig, at that.

Well, actually an insane half-pig.

Newt Gingrich — Fully insane. Half-pig.

Great bumper sticker, no?

But it’s an even better warning.

Since his retirement from day-to-day dictating a few years back, Castro has had a lot of time on his hands. He’s been using some of that spare time to put down his thoughts in an occasional long-winded opinion piece that Cuba’s official media is obliged to publish under the Cuban government’s “free press” statutes, among whose clauses, apparently, include one about Castro being the only person on the island free to have his views published without the taint of censorship.

It’s the kind of constitutional clause that certain individuals among those currently running for the Republican presidential nomination would love to emulate in our Constitution. Which is ironic, considering how each of the candidates falls over backwards trying to portray themselves as the most anti-Castro zealot in the bunch, now that the freak show has moved to the Sunshine State.

Republicans, as is well known, will say anything to any group which they perceive to have a special interest, even if what they are saying today is in direct conflict with something they said to another crowd, with another special interest, earlier in the day. And so it is only natural that when in Florida — which as anyone will tell you is just “90 miles from communism”, and fairly brimming with Cuban exiles — the Republican candidates would gleefully drag the old Cuban Missile Crisis skeleton out of the closet, rattling those dusty old bones in front of the only crowd left in the United States that can still be counted on to go into an involuntary anti-Castro trance-dance, moaning, wailing, foaming at the mouth, and speaking in tongues. It’s the holy rollers of Iowa all over again, except in Spanish. It’s a kind of shameless pandering with is echt Republican, which is why we were treated to all of the anti-Castro sniping between the candidates in the first debate to take place on Florida soil this week.

Naturally, this caught the attention of the Eric Sevareid of Havana, in his most recent column. Castro knew from experience that Cuba would be taking some knocks from the Republican candidates once they reached Florida — both parties have been doing it for years — but this year, even he is appalled by the sheer stupidity of the candidates, especially the part in which Mitt Romney and pompous, erratic, undisciplined, angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband, all-around überhypocrite, fuck-wad of the first order, and freshly-minted self-styled anti-Castro zealot Newt Gingrich debated the point of whether Castro would end up in heaven or hell once he eventually merges with the infinite.

Castro writes, “The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

Jesus.

First Castro slams hydraulic fracking because of its wanton destruction of the environment. Now he issues in one succinct sentence the most clear-eyed assessment of the Republican presidential race that we have read in this entire campaign.

Are we as a nation embarrassed yet?

Do we feel even a twinge of shame that the most long-standing dictator on this planet sees the American political process for what it really is? A media-driven entertainment extravaganza of Jovian proportions, so far removed from the concept of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” that it has become an international joke, and a lousy one at that?

Of all of the problems that are facing America today — problems that this Republican crowd gives short shrift as they debate such issues as whether or not the current president is a socialist, a Muslim, or both, or whether or not convicted felons should be allowed to vote, or whether or not gay marriage will lead to “man-on-dog sex”, or quién es mas conservativo — we can now add to that list that the rest of the world no longer takes seriously our system of government. A system of government which was once a model for the world.

The rest of the world is laughing at us. That is, those who aren’t being kept awake at night by the specter of the country with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world devolving into a nation of hateful, blathering idiots, with itchy trigger fingers, ready to deliver the entire planet to the armageddon which more and more Americans seem to just want to get over with so that they can have a front row seat for the carnage of Jesus coming back and smiting all of the damn sodomites and liberals and Muslims, and, hell, anyone who isn’t white, rich, and/or stupid like them.

Or maybe the rest of the world isn’t laughing at all of us. Maybe they know who the clowns really are. After America’s international prestige fell to its lowest level in history during the George W. Bush administration, one of President Obama’s great accomplishments (among many, not that you’re hearing the media telling anyone about them) has been the restoration of America’s place in the world as a well-regarded beacon of freedom and justice (Guantanamo and pissing on corpses notwithstanding). It could well be that the rest of the world is laughing at the one political party in this country that is worthy of laughter, primarily because as political parties go, it is nothing but a joke.

So great a joke that even someone as seemingly humorless as Fidel Castro is laughing.

But then, he’s been laughing for a long time now.

And good luck with that, Mr. President.

For all of the forward-thinking proposals the president made last night, the party in opposition has not even the slightest bit of interest in seeing any of them carried through. That’s because the Republicans have long since abandoned any pretense of love of country in favor of ousting this president. They don’t even talk about how great America is anymore, so important is the job of unseating this so-called socialist, Islamic, anti-business and therefore anti-job creator in the White House. If America gets a black eye in the process, the Republicans couldn’t give a good God damn.

Speaking of black eyes, John Kerry looked like he’d seen better days last night. His face was mangled, and he had two shiners. As bad as he looked last night, it has been three weeks since he got that way, which should give some indication as to how bad he looked when it first happened. Kerry, who at 68 is still a regular hockey player (OMT’s buddy Skippy is a hockey player, and so we know full well the dedication and commitment these guys have for their sport), was involved in an on-ice mash-up in a hockey game around New Years, in which he broke his nose, resulting in that raccoon face, as well as some stitches. He ended up at the bottom of a pile-up on the ice. Kerry is apparently still a good hockey player, and regularly takes on guys decades his junior. Still, that kind of bravado is not without its risks, as Kerry proved to the nation last night.

Kerry’s two black eyes almost made up for the three missing black robes last night. For the second year in a row, Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas refused to appear with the rest of the Supremes at the president’s State of the Union address, in a fit of pique at a passing remark the president made at his 2010 speech to which the three activist justices took umbrage.

Here at OMT, we think that this kind of temper-tantrum is beneath the dignity of the United States Supreme Court. Although as far as dignity goes, these three particular justices are responsible for the greatest assault on the dignity of the high court as any justice since Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and for many of the same reasons, since these three stooges seem to be cut from the same mold as that ignorant bastard. This is particularly ironic in the case of Clarence Thomas, whom Taney would no doubt recognize as only 3/5 of a justice — a figure which pretty accurately gauges the quality of the justice that Thomas has issued in his tenure on the court. Scalia and Alito don’t even rate that high. Since the three of them are acting like children, we would recommend that they be spanked and sent to bed, except that sort of thing fits perfectly within Thomas’ sexual proclivities, and would thus be no punishment at all.

This business of releasing the president’s speech to the media ahead of time has had the unfortunate consequence of allowing the directors of the live coverage to focus the camera upon people just seconds before the president mentions them in his speech, something which gives the entire proceeding a canned, rehearsed quality that undermines its spontaneity, if you ask us. Like when the camera showed the North Carolina woman with the diamond stud in her nose sitting right beside Michelle Obama just before the president talked about how she’d been unemployed but got training and is now in a new job. Or when the camera landed on Steve Jobs’ widow seconds before the president mentioned his name. Of course, what he didn’t mention are all of those Apple iProducts that are manufactured in China. But he did say that he wanted give tax breaks to companies that brought jobs and products back to the United States, which is something Jobs’ successors are going to have to consider very seriously, given their track record of outsourcing and third world manufacturing. Not to mention all of those iGizmos that are assembled by children overseas, which fits more squarely into Newt Gingrich’s proposed child labor overhaul than it does with President Obama’s vision for the future.

Our overall impression of the president’s speech last night was that if the Republicans think that this president is going to be an electoral push-over this fall, they’re more out of touch with reality than we’ve ever given them credit for, and regular readers of OMT will know that we’ve given them plenty of credit for being out of touch with reality. The president last night aimed his speech directly at the 99% of Americans that are feeling left out of the American Dream. And we think that once this race settles down into a face off between the president and whichever whack-job the Republicans put forward (please, please let it be pompous, erratic, undisciplined, angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband and all-around überhypocrite and fuck-wad of the first order Newt Gingrich) the American people will stand up for what is fair and just for all. For all of their sneering, posturing, and engaging in lies and innuendo, all the Republicans can do is to make Americans feel better without actually making them better.

The Republicans offer only the politics of intoxication. And while spewing invective may make Americans feel better for a while, eventually they wake up the next morning and find not only that they are no better off, but they’ve got such a hangover that they can’t function. The Republicans have won a lot of elections that way, but this year they just might have burned through whatever good will they have left, except among the junkies of hate who are hooked on their message. Americans by and large are no longer interested in drowning out their sorrows in Republican hooch. They’re still reeling from the hangover in 2010, and now they’ve got temperance on their mind. The time has come to put the bottle away and get back to the business of getting this country back on its feet.

It’s no accident that the most famous clinic for substance abuse rehabilitation is named after the wife of a Republican president.

If Jerry Ford was enough to make Betty take to pills and the bottle, this latest crop of Republican presidential wannabees is enough to make even the most stalwart among us reach for the gas pipe.

And certainly not angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband and all-around überhypocrite Newt Gingrich — because, like all of the bad judgments you make after you’ve had that one drink too many, tomorrow morning waits patiently for you to properly regret them. Which, after a convention in which Gingrich emerges triumphant, many if not most Republicans will awaken on Labor Day and say, “Mother of babbling Jesus, we nominated who?” This will be followed by the nightmare of watching the entire party get sucked down the drain by Newt’s widely-expected public implosion in the waning days of the campaign — something which, now that the details of his advanced mental illness are widely known, we will be greatly anticipating.

So, unless this whole, ugly, interminable primary process fails to produce a clear favorite — and the convention, after multiple ballots, throws the nomination wide open, and someone like Jeb Bush, say, steps up as the anybody-but-Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Paul candidate — whichever of the four current contenders winds up with the brass ring will be facing as much opposition from his fellow Republicans as from Democrats and independents.

This is no small problem for the Republicans, not just because they won’t have the juice to unseat President Obama this fall, which is the only real plank in the Republican Party platform this year, but also because of something that has gotten short shrift in all of the discussions in which the TV talking heads engage — the coattail effect.

A weak or divisive candidate at the top of the ticket can have repercussions all the way down to local offices, something of which both parties have traditionally been well aware, but which the Republicans seem to have forgotten about this year in their drive to fire up their whack-job base. The Republican majority in the Congress is not so great that it’s beyond the danger of being turned around this fall, and we can’t think of any of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates who have the coattail chops to drag that majority along behind them.

Nancy Pelosi knows this. In her dream to recapture the House speakership, Pelosi has mounted what she’s calling her “Drive for 25″, to win the 25 seats that the Democrats need in order to recapture the majority. And while Pelosi has been going so far as to say that the Democrats might gain as many as 35 seats — something most analysts view as a pipe dream — there’s reason to believe that her efforts to become speaker again just might bear fruit.

Although as it stands right now, the Democrats are poised to gain anywhere from 5 to 12 seats this fall — quite a bit less than what the Democrats need for a majority — there’s some reason for optimism. Redistricting in some large states, like California (Pelosi’s home state), New York, Illinois, and Florida, have given Democrats an edge (the recent setback at the hands of the Supreme Court in the case of Texas notwithstanding), and a number of Republican Congressmen have announced their retirements. In California alone, three Republicans are retiring, and, thanks to redistricting, several others are facing much tougher reelection battles, as their new districts reflect much more on the blue scale of the spectrum than they did before.

Most analysts agree that the Democrats will make inroads against the Republicans in Congress this fall, but absent the kind of support President Obama was able to generate in 2008, they consider it unlikely that the Democrats will recapture the House.

On the other hand, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that what the Democrats can’t achieve because of the top of their ticket, the Republicans can hand to them with the top of theirs. For all of the reasons we stated above, the four candidates remaining in the race for the nomination present only the following options to Republicans in the way of a nominee: bad, dreadful, unfortunate and catastrophic. That would be Romney, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich, respectively.

So if the Democrats are starting out with 5 to 12, and pick up, say, another 10 or so nationwide because of retirements and redistricting, that puts them at around 15 to 22 new seats, anywhere from 10 to 3 shy of what they need to push them over the top. Romney at the top of the ticket just might make up the difference. Santorum would be good for another dozen new Democratic seats, at least, which definitely puts them over the top. Paul would definitely bring in those 35 seats that Pelosi is dreaming about.

As for Gingrich, well, we may be going out on a limb here, but once the national electorate has taken their full measure of this man (actually, only half-man), we think that the Democrats could gain as many as 100 to 150 seats in Congress, 12 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 20 to 25 state legislatures. And if Newt has his October mental breakdown, as we predict he will, those numbers could easily double.

Seriously, though, there’s no question that Nancy Pelosi’s “Drive for 25″ will at least be helped by the fact that none of the Republican candidates have thus far shown an ability to unite the party in a way that will trickle down to a wider electoral victory for Republicans.

This is one of the reasons why next week’s Florida primary is so important. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — small, homogeneous principalities whose electorates reflect a narrow, almost myopic worldview at wide variance with the nation as a whole — Florida is large, diverse, and the closest we have seen in this race thus far to something that approaches a reflection of national attitudes. A decisive win here by one of these candidates might just change the calculus in a big way. But again, that all depends upon which candidate it is. If Gingrich wins big in Florida, for example, the fate of the Republican Party will be sealed, and it will be something along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino film.

Here at OMT, we wish Nancy luck in her quest, of course. But what we give with our right hand, we take away with our left. Because we feel very strongly that should the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, and retain or even extend their control of the Senate, the time is long overdue for new leadership in the Democratic Party. And that means that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid must go. The Democratic Party needs strong leadership that is an equal match to the Republicans, who are capable of thwarting Republican intransigence and beating them over the head with it before shoving it up their ass. Who can play the game by the rules that the Republicans have been playing by, and that means not coming to a gun fight with a knife.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been monuments of the deeply-ingrained weakness that Americans have come to loathe about the Democratic Party, and which is the primary reason for the failure of the Democrats to get their message out to the very people who would most benefit by the Democratic vision of America’s future.

It’s time for fresh faces in the Democratic caucus, people who not only share the vision of opportunity for all, which has long been the hallmark of the Democratic Party, but who also have the strength, the guile, the focus, and the singularity of purpose to achieve that vision, and to send forth the word that this is a party that is committed to ensuring that everyone has an equal shot at a new American Dream.

President Obama can’t do it alone, as we have seen. If he should have the great good fortune of a second term with his own party back in control of the Congress, then let that Congress give us new leadership that is up to the task of bringing America back from the abyss.