Sunday 12 August 2012

Evil Empire

I'd like to take a moment to thank Mitt Romney for choosing Paul Ryan as his veep candidate.  It just got much harder for the US press to spin Romney as anything else than a money-grubbing figurehead for a new American aristocracy.

Not that they can't manage that, obviously.  It'll just be a tougher sell.  If you're trying to piece together a hagiography designed to cloak incoherent malevolence with the clear result of harming your fellow citizens, I think you should at least have to work up a sweat.

I'd also like to offer up a suggestion to a God or Gods or force or forces in which I don't believe: it would mean a lot to me and a lot of other people if you took every single person who praises Ryan without including the phrases "even though he wants abortion classified as first-degree murder" and "despite him wanting to introduce legislation requiring women with life-threatening pregnancies be left to die" be immediately killed through the painful insertion of poisonous scorpions into whatever bodily orifice you deem most appropriate.  I'd suggest the anus, personally, but it's not my place to advise on how you enact your righteous vengeance.

I don't know what makes my brain hurt more, the fact that Mitt Romney's choice to make the GOP ticket more likable is a man who's only problem with Soylent Green is that it smacks too much of recycling, or that in contemporary America, it's actually liable to work.

2 comments:

Tomsk said...

Yes, interesting that the Republican party at large is smart enough to pick the least insane candidate but then Romney himself blows it by making a 'bold' choice for VP. It's great that the Republicans have made themselves all but unelectable, though it does increase the fear that events could yet conspire to turn it back into a referendum on Obama's handling of the economy. I assume that's what Romney is banking on with this choice.

SpaceSquid said...

I hope you're right that this has made the GOP ticket unelectable absent new developments, but I keep reading things like this, from Bob Draper at the NY Times:

"[Bill] Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities [USA] informed a focus group that Romney supported the [Paul] Ryan budget plan — and thus championed "ending Medicare as we know it" — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing."

Turns out the Devil's greatest trick was not to convince mankind he didn't exist, but to repeatedly insist he did exist, and have his mates in the press corps keep insisting he wasn't really serious about that whole soul-taking business.