Time for some brutally frank words about the election, who came out on top, and who faceplanted on the stage. Time to document the atrocities, as they say:
The Winners
Tea Party Pretenders Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner
These two snow-jobbed not only their states, but the nation as well. A pair of Teabagger fists in velvet gloves, they ran masterful campaigns against bad candidates and won easily, much like Rand Paul did four years ago. The Villagers ate them up and Colorado and Iowa, like Kentucky, are going to find out just how embarrassing Senators can be. Six years is going to be a long, long time for the voters in these two states.
Actual Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz
Mitch may get the shiny job title and Harry Reid's office, but the guy actually running things in the upper chamber is going to be Ted Cruz and his Tea Party Circus. Cruz's 2016 chances hinge on how much chaos he can cause by becoming a spinning tornado of red state red meat, and there's going to be a lot of it flying around over the next two years.
Obstruction And Gridlock
Republicans proved beyond a doubt that they can now get away with any sort of bad behavior that hurts the country and the middle class, and that the people that actually bother to show up to vote will never punish them for it. They'll just blame That One. Why the hell would Republicans start compromising now? They're winning, and that's all that matters. If they can keep the country broken to the point of mass voter apathy, 2016 will be a cake walk for them and they know it.
FOX News
The Age of Obama has been very, very good to Roger Ailes and his propaganda squad. Loading up for bear for 2016 with guaranteed ratings for the next two years means they'll be able to pick all the fights they want to. You thought they hated Obama before? You ain't seen nothin' yet, kids.
Chris Christie
Head of the Republican Governor's Association, on top of being the Villagers' sentimental favorite, and just proved he can make winners. GOP picked up governor's mansions in Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland(!!?!?) and defended in Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin and Kansas, all races they were supposed to lose. Like it or not, "Sit down and shut up" Christie gets credit for being The Asshole Who Wins.
The Rich
Of course. Best couple billion ever spent to get people not to vote.
Hillary Clinton
Yes, Hillary Clinton. All of the above winners need an enemy, after all, and Obama won't be President forever (as much as they'd love it.) No matter what she actually does, she's the one all the GOP will be running against. She will be known by the enemies she makes.
The Losers
Steve Israel, Michael Bennet, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz
The head of the Dems' House re-election committee, Senate re-election committee, and DNC chair, respectively. All need to be removed from those positions by the end of the week. Israel in fact has already tendered his resignation as his Blue Dog candidates for House were destroyed in the election. But Bennet's head needs to roll too for his epic Senate foul up and Wasserman Schultz cannot be replaced quickly enough. Bennet especially needs to get tossed out on his ass, as he was the "genius" behind the Bannock Street Project, the Dems' turnout engine in 2014. Guess what? Worst turnout in nearly a century, Mike. Your ass needs to be gone in a heartbeat. That's the real house cleaning the Dems need to do.
Martin O'Malley
The Maryland governor and prospective 2016 White House candidate ended his Presidential run Tuesday when his hand-picked successor and Lieutentant Governor went down in flames to a Republican. Instead of being on the road testing the waters for 2016, he should have been taking care of business in his own damn state. The complete opposite of Chris Christie, which makes him a truly awesome human being, but a loser of a political maestro.
John Boehner
Congrats, Orange Julius! You win two more years of riding herd on a pile of writhing hate-filled rabid beasts who all want to destroy you! Good luck with that.
Mitch McConnell
Congrats, Old-Age Mutant Nimrod Turtle! You win two more years of riding herd on a
pile of writhing hate-filled rabid beasts who all want to destroy you!
Good luck with that. Also, do you know that Ted Cruz has your job?
Rand Paul
You're not Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz has Mitch's job. Also, good luck with your crazy dad. Also, since Ketucky Democrats kept the state House, you're going to have to decide whether or not you really want to run for President or Senate in 2016, because you can't do both. Please do the former, so I can be rid of you for good.
Jury's Still Out On...
President Obama
Depends on what he does on immigration executive action, how the war against ISIS goes, and how many veto pens he has ready to go. The lesson here however is betting against Obama usually ends in tragedy, something both Republicans and Democrats will re-learn in the next two years.
MSNBC
I've basically stopped watching them, but they are a necessary counter to FOX News. They are terrible at being that counter, but they're still necessary.
Voter Suppression Laws
Near record low turnout for a midterm sure shows how effective they are in the South, but that happened too in blue states like California, Oregon and Colorado where voting is super easy. The best voter suppression is voter depression.
Make your thoughts known in the comments, I want to hear from you guys.
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6 comments:
I don't think Howard Dean can be lured back. (Remember 2008?)
I sure wish he could though.
My first whiff of trouble in 2009 came from the shutting down of Dean's operations within the party and cooperation with external organizers without. Team Obama could call it anything they liked, but the import was all organization and direction for the party would come from them. This struck the nascent participatory democracy movements like a spritz of glyphosate. In the short term this gave some benefits from coherence, but you didn't even need hindsight to see that in the long run we would pay.
I must take care not to overstate the case, as the elwiors and gooserocks of the Daily Kos are on suicide watch after this election proved that they are a fringe gaggle of political incompetents with unpopular opinions and useless policy prescriptions. With such devastating force in the drubbing, even they can no longer ignore the evidence as the people have spoken. It really is hard to believe that a operational mistake by Obama is really to blame ineptitude and impotence of these people. So with the utter failure of these once promising internet based reform movements, what tools do we have left in our kit?
Clinton is obviously a winner in all this mess. The unicorn ranchers are going to run of and exhume the corpses of Lenin and Trotsky in the desperate hope of new leadership, clearing the decks - in so far as they needed clearing, with no Obama figure present on the horizon to represent a serious primary challenge - for a run at the Presidency. Structural factors suggest that the Democrats will do very much better in 2016 in any case.
Might as well say this one last time: McConnell is a genius for picking his strategy of stone wall obstruction and sticking with it until it worked. The country needs government that works, and when he choked it off he knew it was only a matter of time before the People started to blame the president - insane, I know, given the realities of DC but that is how people work - and the Democrats started shooting each other with frustration over the chronic inability to translate electoral victories into effective policy improvements.
He needed six years and wasted a trillion dollars in opportunity costs from the crippled economy that his methods prevented from full recovery, but the simple fact is that the Republicans were willing and able to pay the cost (and to force the rest of us to pay the cost as well) and now they have their victory.
So the elwiors and gooserocks are squealing about how stupid Americans are and how stupid Republicans are and I can only say that they have the wrong idea about who is stupid here.
My bad: the McConnell obstruction cost us a trillion dollars EVERY YEAR that the economy is underperforming relative to its trajectory before the Bush implosion . That is about half of annual federal government spending, wasted and thrown away each and every year as an invisible tax on every one of us. This was the price we all paid for the Republican victory, against which the billion dollars in ready cash is trivial. I will eat my arm if the so called Liberal Media ever brings up this fact.
Grayson won again in Florida, so there is that. And the mj law lost by 2.5% - they got 57.5 and needed 60 - but for a bunch of Reefer Madness-infected old people, they still almost got that one through. But liberal laws by and large got approved - which makes the Stupdifactor in electorating Republicants even more mystifying.
Maybe Dean can work with Sanders and the next american party can start. Get Grayson, Franken, Ellison, and a few more of the more liberal congresscritters to walk away from the Democrats and start pushing truly liberal policies all the time. Actively push back against the Stupidifacating big money.
Or - just figure out a way to try and survive if the whole thing falls apart before you do.
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