The Real Horror of This Past November 6

 

The Republicans are horrified, or they profess to be.   They just can't understand how they were denied yet another shot at wrecking the U.S. economy, reviving Jim Crow days, and herding all the Latinos back to Mexico, and now they are as busy as can be, looking for those responsible for their rejection.  They are looking everywhere except where they should be directing their dumbfounded gazes  -- in a mirror.

--Except that that wouldn't help them either, because their mirrors are not silvered in the usual way, and instead the Regressicans tolerate having around only things that are fashioned to assure them of how necessary they are.

And regardless, the real horror of those elections is not in any way the fact that they lost.   Instead it's that they got as many votes as they did. The real horror and a very poor reflection on the U.S. as a whole is that the margin of Obama's victory was as close as the three or four million edge that he had in the popular vote, in a country of over 300 million, and his 106-vote edge in the electoral college.   The real horror is that the Republican Party is still taken that seriously by so many or by anyone at all, since during the campaign they didn't take one stand that wasn't egregiously, totally, manifestly and in every other way ill-considered, indecent, immoral, and just out and out wrong.  No, not one!

To amplify that point, here I could continue in thousands of different directions, though any one of those should be all that's needed at any one time, such as in a diary.   That small number is probably all that is behind most votes cast anyway.

For now, as we would at the outset of the first game in a World Series, let's look at the lineup that the Republicans used this year.   It was pretty paltry, I would say, not even worthy of being a contender in a kiddy league.   Having long since given dismissal notices to all the reasonable, feasible, halfway distinguished figures in their midst, left over from before the Tea Party boarding of the boat, the Repubs were left without any heavy hitters, as could easily be seen in the prospects that they tried out during their primaries.

 I mean the "Crazy Eight," or Seven, or however many there were at any one time, that consisted almost entirely of moral cripples, such as the pompous and abusive reject from yesteryear named Newt Gingrich, the walking, talking, padded shoulders dummy named Rick Perry, the odious Rich Santorum, the shrill and certifiably insane Michele Bachmann, and the repulsive carnival clown Herman Cain.  Ron Paul might have been a faint possibility, but he had shown some colors that just weren’t right, in his infamous newsletters of too short a while ago.  Have I left anyone out?   Oh yes,  The Romney guy, and now more is known about him than anyone would ever want to know.   And that left Jon Huntsman as their only prospect with anything near a Presidential air.  But because he had been Obama's ambassador to China, and because he was not toxic and nauseating like the other Republican contenders, he was roundly dismissed by the mean-spirited conservative audience whose votes they sought and by his presumed colleagues themselves.

And because that kind of caustican is therefore the only kind that is looked upon favorably by today's Repubs, to continue my baseball analogy, it's hard to see how there can be any better players anywhere on their farm teams that the Repubs can bring up for the next Presidential go-round, when they will be facing the by then well-rested and well-tested Mrs. Clinton, a woman with more smarts (and more experience already on the White House level) than any 10 candidates bound together with a Republican label.

This year in the lead-off spot the Repubs had for their Presidential contender a man who could have been seen as matching up with the evil-tempered, bigoted Ty Cobb of yore, famed for spraying more than his share of singles and doubles and in which he was greatly helped by his rep for using his spikes on anyone at hand while running the bases.  But in today's times, with all the fences having been pulled back considerably by any number of persistent problems, the Repubs are going to need someone more suited for the cleanup spot -- a far-sighted longball hitter -- and the carefully thinking and clear-eyed political Ted Williamses and Henry Aarons are just nowhere to be seen on today's or 2016's Republican rosters.  The attitudes of a party that would countenance seeing rape as being an "act of God" are a big turnoff to that kind of player.