November 2012

For Republicans it is post-mortem time, pointing-fingers, giving each other the finger and slowly removing their fingers from their ears which have deafened them to the voice of the people. They might use their thumb to hitch a ride back from Oz. It must be a harsh re-entry and it seems that many of the knuckleheads have chosen to remain delusional singing, If I Only Had A Brain.

Not a single Democrat lost his/her seat and the president has won a 3 million vote plurality but the Republicans seem to think it was their victory with a resounding endorsement of the Romney/Ryan tax plan. Boehner and McConnell might as well be the scarecrow and tin man.

For those paying attention this was an historic moment. The diversity of America can no longer be ignored. The non-white population will grow by 30 million four years from now while the Whites will decline. White men are dying on the golf course every day.  The party which denies evolution, climate change and woman’s reproductive rights also denies that time moves forward. Their effort to turn the calendar counter-clockwise has failed.

It is said the first casualty of war is truth. This is also the case with culture wars. As the late Sen. Moynihan said, You're entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. We have witnessed candidate Romney repeatedly lie until his nose grew from here to the Cayman Islands. His statements had a shelf-life of less than 24 hours as he would renounce Monday’s remarks by Tuesday morning.

Even a part of corporate America felt compelled to correct his fib when he charged Chrysler with shipping jobs overseas to China. Romney lost because he is an inauthentic man caught in an untenable situation. He was called upon to pander and deceive and his ambition blinded him to the naked falsity of himself. The emperor finally had no clothes and no core.

A corollary to the sacrifice of truth is the degradation of language. Words are abused, bloated and exhausted. What remains is a battlefield strewn with limp words badly in need of triage. Language deserves better. Taxes, Government, compromise, rape, entitlement, liberty and personhood are casualties that beg to be scrutinized and revivified.  

The unprecedented purchase of air time particularly on Ohioan, Virginian and Floridian ears most certainly had somewhat of a numbing effect. Our bodies showed they are self-healing. To some extent our senses know when to shut down. Paradoxically Rove and his purveyors of disinformation got caught in their own echo chamber of deceit. They only persuaded themselves through repetitive smears and many are still trapped in a carpal tunnel of the brain.