Raging at Failure

I understand the rage, the anger, and the threats of violence at the McCain/Palin campaign stops. After eight years of right wing Republican rule the base is worse off today. Starting from this low point, the family values Joe and Jane six-pack voter sees their world about to fall further off a cliff.

First priority to the McCain/ Palin base voter is family values. Yet, four years after Bush II and we have legal gay marriage in our largest state and as of this week one of the tiniest, Conn. The latter, a former bastion of blue blood America. Gays are also everywhere; in the congress and their attendant airport rest rooms, commerce, entertainment, and probably living next door. They are open about their lifestyle and so accepted by almost everyone that it is hard not to know a family without a gay member somewhere on the tree.

Divorce, at an all time high, is so normal no one gives it a second glance. Sex has become, if it were even possible, more ubiquitous in the last four years. There is more of it everywhere; TV, music, fashion and in the ultimate insult to the family values voter, the Internet where it is uncontrolled, anonymous and free! Sex has even reached in Sara Palin's teen daughter’s bedroom or back car seat. Hanna Montana was just a money making show, the real Millie Cyrus is a hot to trot babe, so much for Disney family entertainment.

Has anyone been to a mall anywhere lately? It looks like a U.N meeting from the 60’s. Asian and black babies with white parents, the same pairing potential goes for husbands and wives. Indians from the real India stroll around looking as bored as everyone else. The polyglot America that is now the backdrop for everyone’s reality must be deeply frightening to the McCain/ Palin crowd.

Second up to the angry, might be hatred of “the government”. After George the second and his eight years, it is bigger than ever. A surplus in the Treasury has devolved into a mountain of debt. The size of the federal government has exploded too. Bush added more entitlements than anyone since Lyndon Johnson.

Now, in the last month federal spending just grew faster than a fourteen year old on steroids. The Republicans don’t want to redo the Herbert Hoover playbook and have true free markets. They are fast tracking a “new new big money deal” at the speed electrons are being beamed by the super collier near Geneva.

The state governments too have bloated to previously unimaginable levels of spending and debt in the last eight years. So the “rage voter” sees the upcoming republican economic handoff as starting from a fiscal train wreck. Voodoo economics they turned out to be. Only the pins that were used were stuck deep in the six-packs. The rich bought advantaged tax policies to ward off the evil spells. Everyone else saw his or her living standards erode.

The war against terror and “terrorists” was opened on two fronts and has met failure on both of them, while creating a black hole that sucks up cash. Osama is still on the loose, sending disquieting messages. We’re in Iraq longer than WWII and the idea of a McCain prophesized “victory” has the same level of reality as Dick Fuld assurances about Lehman’s future prospects. Just lies spoken for the moment. Extended stop loss tours by weekend warriors in the National Guard have punished the base by forcing them to sacrifice for the Iraq war far more than any other group in our society. This has caused a backlash against the war that is revealed in poll after poll. The Republican’s have torn the very fabric of the culture they professed to preserve. How many hedge fund managers or investment bankers’, sons or daughters have been wounded or killed fighting “terrorists” in Iraq?

Now this core, beer hall putsch mob sees their last hope going down. The handoff to the liberals is taking place from the lowest point both in the real world of debt and war, and the imaginary world of the culture wars. Even the half million plus fine leveled against CBS for Janet’s wardrobe malfunction was thrown out by the conservative third circuit court. The fact that the handoff will be to a black man with a foreign name who spent a part of his youth in a Muslim country must be nothing less than apoplectic. No wonder end of days Sara resonates so strongly with this base. The redemption of America, that the blue states voter sees as hope and faith in the future, must seem as a return to counter culture dominance of the pre-Nixon years to the red states voter.

What comes around goes around. The Hegelian dialectic still operates and the spinning needle of reaction and synthesis seems poised to land on a person and place of very new dimensions. Understand the anger of those at McCain and Palin Rallies, it’s the cry of the pained and wounded that have gained nothing and are about to loose even more.