Rick Perry's Ad Signals Republican Ragnarok

Surely by now you’ve seen the Rick Perry YouTube ad that is the latest faceplant his campaign has engineered for him.  The rocket scientists in charge of his run at the Oval Office forgot to turn off the YouTube “like/dislike” button, and so far the odious thing’s received the second most “dislikes” YouTube ever has recorded. The only thing the American public hates more than this Perry ad is Justin Bieber’s video for “Baby.”

(In all honesty . . . I think that is the correct call.)

The ad features Perry, all saddle-faced and aw-shucksin’ it in an outdoor scene shot somewhere in Deutschland, explaining that he loves him some Baby Jeebus and he hates him some gays.  He especially hates them military gays that volunteer to fight and risk their lives for America.  Just thinkin’ ‘bout them gays makes him shudder and feel all icky inside.  The thing might almost be a Stephen Colbert parody but Perry apparently intended for it to be taken seriously, so others have been forced to provide the parody for which the thing so desperately cries out.  The meta-parody, as it were:

“Demonization”: A Fundamental Political Difference

I’ve been focusing a lot more on the Republican primary over the past few days, which means that I’ve been trying to get inside the collective head of Republican base voters – whom John Rogers, aka Kung Fu Monkey, so hilariously (and, as would later turn out time and again, accurately) named “the Crazy 27%."

In expressing my views, analyses, and speculations, I’ve used terms like “the Crazies,” “the Orderlies,” and “the Asylum.”  And I’ve suggested that a lot of these voters are motivated by sheer meanness, a desire to be the biggest, baddest, toughest prick on the block.  But I have also made the claim that neither I nor anyone on the Left that I can think of actually demonizes Republican base voters.

It occurred to me that some of my characterizations might be seen as undermining my assertion “we don’t demonize Republican voters,” so I thought I’d try to explain a little more fully (i) who I’m actually talking about, (ii) what I mean by my “non-demonization” claim, and (iii) why this is a fundamental difference between the Liberal base and the Conservative base.

Ron Paul: Crazier'n a Bag of Snakes

Well, I tuned into last night’s Republican nomination debate.  If there were any doubt before that the media think it’s their responsibility to pick winners and losers for the American people, this spectacle should have put such doubts to rest.  So far as the moderators were concerned, last night very much was Rick Perry’s Big Debut: Going Toe to Toe with Mitt.  Every candidate other than Rick Perry and Mitt Romney – the two frontrunners who Conventional Wisdom says will have to fight it out in a steel cage death match for the nomination – got amazingly short shrift. 

Moreover, even when one of the other, lesser candidates did get a question it seemed to me that two times out of three it was a question about Rick Perry.  At one point pretty much all the candidates got involved in a 5 minute discussion regarding Perry’s decision to have little girls inoculated against the Human Papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer.  This was an issue, apparently, because many true blue Conservatives feel that only the threat of cervical cancer prevents their little girls from one day having Teh Sex -- and as all true blue Conservatives will tell you, women having Teh Sex is worse than women getting The Cancer.

But as crazy as that sideshow was, inch-for-inch and pound-for-pound the greatest entertainment bang for your buck last night was to be found in the demented little Keebler Elf that is Ron Paul.

Refusing (Barely) the Red Pill

Well . . . that was interesting.

I waited up until a little past 11:00 last night, to find out what was going to happen with the budget and whether we’d have a government shutdown.  I had geared up for a shutdown, although I recognized that the odds were at least even that nothing of the sort would ever occur.

But, in a weird way, I have to confess to a bit of a letdown that it didn’t happen.  Not because I wanted to see the government shut down – God forbid.  But because it makes understanding where we are now, politically, as a nation, just a little bit more difficult.

By the time the last few hours, yesterday, were ticking down, the only real dispute was about federal funding of women’s reproductive health services.  And, no, that is not a euphemism.  And let me repeat that – the federal government was in the process of being shut down, because of a dispute about the funding of women’s health services.

Let’s back up.