Leading voices of the Republican Tea Party cult — clockwise from top: Sarah Palin, 2008 Republican nominee for vice-president, half-term governor of Alaska; Congressman Allen West, Florida; Congressman Michael Coffman, Congressman Todd Akin, U.S. Senate candidate, Missouri; Colorado; Congressman Chip Cravaack, Minnesota; Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Minnesota; Tea Party polemicist Ann Coulter; Congressman Joe Walsh, Illinois; Congressman Steve King, Iowa; Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Der amerikanische Autor und Edgar-Gewinner Thomas Adcock berichtet exklusiv für CULTurMAG in seiner wöchentlichen Kolumne von dem täglichen Wahnsinn des US-Wahlkampfs. Heute: Die Blödmänner werden nervös.
Runnin‘ Scared
Moments after last week’s third and final presidential election debate between incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Willard Mitt Romney, a professional termagant by the name of Ann Coulter took to the Twittersphere to once more demonstrate a flair for bigoted triviality in the cause of the formerly respectable Republican Party.
Her inelegant assessment of Mr. Romney’s performance came by way of a crude remark that could well be the last gasp of repellent right-wing bombast that has exhausted the patience of Americans, at long last. Ms. Coulter and her minions—the crazed hemorrhoid sufferers of the “Tea Party,” a corporate-funded cult of racist know-nothings in control of the national Republican apparatus—are now clearly “runnin’ scared” of the very idea that Mr. Obama will likely win a new lease on the White House next Tuesday.
As the late, great Roy Orbison expressed it in the eponymous song:
Just runnin’ scared, each place we go
So afraid that he might show
Yeah, runnin’ scared, what would I do
If he came back and wanted you?
“I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard,” Ms. Coulter averred on debate night. No doubt she imagined this as clever reference to the Republican candidate’s surprisingly deferential mien in his final face-to-face with Mr. Obama. In so twittering or tweeting (whichever you prefer), Ms. Coulter managed to simultaneously plump for her predictable choice and deride a vulnerable stratum of humanity.
The “queen of calumniation” (among the printable descriptions offered by Ms. Coulter’s detractors) is hardly alone in the past four years of an idiot-child inability on the part of Republicans to accept that an African American could be gainfully employed in the Oval Office. Never mind that Mr. Obama’s curriculum vitae is considerable and impressive, and that his personal story is a hybrid of uber-American sentimentalists Horatio Alger and Norman Rockwell, men of assuredly Anglo-Saxon bona fides.
A kneejerk conservative polemicist who routinely challenges the sexual identities and orientations of declared enemies—Ms. Coulter claims that journalist Richard Wolffe was once a woman, and that dozens of her liberal counterparts are either gay or lesbian—she is herself assumed by many in the American transsexual community to be a sister under the skin. The sex-change demimonde notes telling details.
Ms. Coulter’s height, for instance, is officially six feet (1.82 m). But this measure does not include the noticeable arch in sister’s back, which would make her true stature as much as six and one-half feet (2 m). She has rather broad shoulders and a quite prominent, surgery-proof Adam’s apple. According to a report in Rolling Stone magazine, her moniker is “mAnn Coulter.”
The strapping Ms. Coulter is not alone in hypocritical vituperation. The clownish Republican Tea Party caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives stands to be decimated in next month’s federal election, due to its record of odious aspersions—most of them reflective of a sexual obsession with which tea partiers grapple, not to mention projections of their shrouded proclivities:
• “Think about this,” Congressman Joe Walsh said of Sandra Fluke, whose testimony before an all-male House subcommittee on the issue of women’s medical needs was ungallantly spurned. “A law student, who has been a student for life, gets up here in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives.’ You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job!”
• “If it’s a legitimate rape,” posited Todd Akin, candidate for U.S. Senate from the state of Missouri, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
• Congressman Chip Cravaack, a House freshman from Minnesota, labels insurance-paid contraception for women as a required benefit in the new national health care law as “an act of federal aggression.” He is silent on the matter of cost-free male enhancement drugs required under the same law.
• Congressman Michael Coffman approved a Colorado television spot inferring that his Democratic Party opponent, Joe Miklos, was an ally of child molesters. The ad was so vile that the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, historically supportive of Republicans, was moved to issue a statement disassociating the organization from the “distasteful and grossly misleading…totally false” commercial.
• Congressman Steve King, who describes his friend Todd Akin as a “strong Christian man,” recently voted against a House bill that would expand the power of police officers to investigate complaints of rape on Native American tribal reservations. When a group of Native American women protested outside his local congressional office in Iowa, he said, “This is completely a campaign stunt. They don’t even know what they’re talking about.”
• Further in the matter of violent sexual assault on women, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, candidate for the U.S. Senate, said during a televised debate last week that he opposes aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because that is “something that God intended to happen.”
• Congressman Allen West, a favorite African American dancing bear among Tea Party activists, says President Obama is “the dumbest person walking around in America right now,” that eighty member of the Democratic Party caucus in the House are communists, and that liberals with the “message of equality of achievement” should “get the hell out of the United States.” In 2003, while stationed in Iraq as a U.S. Army lieutenant, Mr. West wrote a letter to his wife, in which he asked, “Angela, I need to know—are you committed to being my porn star?”
• In a television interview, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said of her fellow lawmakers, “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” During her run earlier this year for the Republican presidential nomination, she told newspaper reporters that she was “very proud of our business,” meaning Minneapolis-based Bachmann & Associates, headed by the congresswoman’s fey husband, Marcus. The Bachmanns call their enterprise a “Christian counseling clinic.” Patients include gay men whom Mr. Bachmann engages in prayer therapy designed to “cure” homosexuality.
All eight of the foregoing Republican Tea Party stalwarts—others, too—are under vigorous challenge for re-election by well-financed Democrats who exhibit lucidity, civility, and a willingness to govern. The stalwarts are destined to defeat in next week’s federal elections for the simple reason that their constituents—and American voters in general, according to prominent opinion polls—are sick and tired of buffoonery. There is serious public business in need of attendance by serious people—beginning with basic governance, which has been sorely lacking since mid-term congressional elections in 2010 created an obstructionist Republican Tea Party majority in the House.
The seeds of obstruction commenced on inauguration day in January 2009. Even as Mr. Obama’s left hand lay atop the King James version of the Holy Bible as he raised his right to take the oath of office, a cabal of high-ranking Republicans—including Mr. Romney’s running mate for the vice-presidency, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, leader of the Senate’s Republican caucus—closeted themselves in a Capitol Hill restaurant to plot against the new administration.
The plotters pact: any legislation proposed over the next four years by Mr. Obama or his Democratic allies in Congress would be automatically opposed in the House and filibustered in the Senate. Their hope: total humiliation of a black man in a big white house.
As Mr. McConnell later proudly confessed, in an interview with the National Journal newspaper, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
In every voter survey conducted since the McConnell admission, the American people have expressed disgust with premeditated political intransigence. According to a poll by the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper most favored by conservative Republicans, only one in ten Americans believe the current Congress is acting in the public interest. For the most part, voters blame the Tea Party gang.
Now looms a Day of Reckoning.
The Walsh-Aiken-Cravaack-Coffman-King-Mourdock-West-Bachmann wing of the Republican Party is likely going down on November 6th. The people have had quite enough. The cuckoos may well go the forgotten way of Sarah Palin, empress of idiocy and the cutie-pie Tea Party shrike nominated in 2008 by Republicans as their vice-presidential standard-bearer.
In an article for the August edition of Jezebel, an online magazine, acerbic journalist Doug Barry took note of how Ms. Palin’s star turn as a post-2008 opinionatrix for the right-wing Fox News operation had seemly expired by the time of this year’s successor Republican jamboree in Tampa, Florida. As pin-up girl for mouth-breathing lackwits, however, her appeal remains intact.
“Just four years after Sarah Palin was summoned onto the stage of the Republican National Convention [of 2008] by the Norse god of mischief, the former Alaskan governor has intimated that Fox News would rather she not appear on television and grasp at relevance during the Republican National Convention [of 2012],” Mr. Barry wrote. “Bereft of a more glamorous platform, Palin took to the social media outlet of the proletariat—Facebook—to let all those people who think it’s just too late to disavow [her] because they’d look stupid in front of all their friends [and] that she was ‘sorry’ that Fox had cancelled all of her scheduled interviews.”
So it was that the looniest of Tea Party loons was a no-show this year in Tampa. Standing in, however, was her doppelgänger—a buxom actress by the stage name “Lisa Ann,” lead performer in the pornographic video “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?”, a hot-seller among the aforementioned mouth-breathers.
For her Tampa appearance, Ms. Ann performed a political peep show at a lounge in that city called the Dollhouse. Her act was a daily sell-out during the convention week. Republican Tea Party droolers in the Dollhouse audience were presumably unbothered by media reports in which their substitute pin-up fave described her politics as “pro-Obama.”
Sic transit Gloria mundi.
Tidbits & Boldface Names from the Campaign Trail
Apart from insistence by Republicans that federal lands and coastlines should sprout a plethora of new oil derricks—and that mathematics and such is really, really important for schoolchildren—issues of science are absent from this year’s presidential election campaign. Global warming, for instance, has received minimal policy attention from President Barack Obama or Democrats in the Congress.
Meanwhile, twenty-two Republican members of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives have, at one time or another, expressed doubt about or outright denial of climate change—perhaps influenced by hefty donations to their campaign treasuries from oil companies. And most of these determinedly ignorant lawmakers (all but one male) have reservations about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, settled knowledge on the genesis of our home planet, and evidence of female physiology.
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory—all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” said Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia during a recent gathering of his constituents. “I don’t believe that Earth’s but about nine-thousand years old. I believe it was created in six days. That’s what the Bible says.”
Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri is world-famous for breaking the news of women’s magical ability to prevent pregnancy should they be “legitimately” raped.
“I haven’t seen anything that convinces me global warming is real, much less caused by human activity,” Congressman Mo Brooks told a newspaper reporter in his home state of Alabama. “And I’m not familiar with any [adverse effects of carbon dioxide] on human beings.”
The committee is headed by eighty-nine-year-old Congressman Ralph Moody Hall of Texas, who last year discussed his disbelief in global warming via anthropogenic climate change with the National Review.
“I’m really more fearful of freezing, and I don’t have any science to prove that,” Mr. Hall said. He added, ever more cryptically, “We have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts.”
Possibly, though improbably, Mr. Hall and the others will find the current issue of Scientific American magazine (November 2012) of interest: in particular, an article by filmmaker Shawn Lawrence Otto, titled “Anti-science Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy.”
“By falsely equating knowledge with opinion [anti-science Republicans] collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy,” writes Mr. Otto, co-producer of “The House of Sand and Fog,” among his motion picture ventureps. “Public discourse is reduced to endless warring opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might makes right—the classic definition of authoritarianism.”
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His notorious disinterest in foreign affairs inspired one of Mitt Romney’s exasperated campaign aides to confide in a Washington Post reporter. The aide, who went unnamed, said he could not be sure that Mr. Romney troubled himself to read top-secret daily briefings on world news events prepared by the U.S. State Department for the president and his potential replacements. The candidate’s disinterest apparently extends to maps, and maybe Islam.
During last week’s final debate with President Barack Obama, Mr. Romney declared, “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea.” In addition to improper grammar and the possible conflation of Arab Muslims with their Persian co-religionists, Mr. Romney erred on geography. With a southern border incorporating the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Sea—and with the Caspian Sea at the northern shores—Iran has no need of oceanic transit through Syria. Besides which, the two countries are separated by a large place called Iraq.
These failings aside, Mr. Romney managed to correctly pronounce the name of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On previous occasions, it came out sounding like “I’m-a-dinner-jacket.”
Of the Persian threat, Mr. Romney said at the debate, “I look at what’s happening around the world, and I see Iran four years closer to [the atomic] bomb.” Which prompted the television satirist Stephen Colbert to riposte, “When you think about it, aren’t we all?”
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Although she is the Republican presidential candidate’s ex-sister-in-law, Ronna Romney of suburban Detroit has remained close to Mitt Romney. A two-time Republican loser in her campaigns for U.S. senator from Michigan, Ms. Romney currently hosts a show on business subjects for WXYT News Talk radio.
Recently, Ms. Romney took time out from broadcasting to offer dubious assistance to the cause of her former in-law. As a special feature for her Facebook page, she posted several images of the mangled body of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens, murdered during the September 11th terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. As caption for the images, Ms. Romney wrote, “Obama killed him.” Her words were highlighted with images of dripping blood.
Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Adcock
THOMAS ADCOCK is a novelist and journalist based in New York City. Winner of the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by Mystery Writers of America, his books and articles have been published worldwide. Writing as Tom Dey, he is currently completing a new novel titled “Lovers & Corpses.” Mehr zu Thomas Adcock hier und hier.
