sitting in my hotel room in london and i just finished watching bush’s final
state of the union address.
eh. to be honest it was kind of a non-event.
no nutty comments about steroids or trips to mars.
no new members in the axis-of-e-vil.
he just seemed sort of out of touch and a bit lost and sort of
desperate in a ‘uh oh, i don’t want to leave
office with a 25% approval rating’ kind of way.
it got me thinking about the state of the republican right in 2008.
and how fractured it is.
to make a big sweeping generalization, there are 4 big components
to the republican right(let’s use simpsons examples)-
1-the flanderses(aka-cultural evangelical conservatives)
2-mr burns and kent brockman(rich guys who don’t like taxes)
3-cletus and brandene(ignorant hicks who believe that barack obama lives in baghdad with wmd’s)
4-grampa simpson(scared and angry people over 70)
the truth is that none of these people really agree with or share the others concerns/agendas.
mr burns could really care less about prayer in school
or roe-v-wade or gays in the military, he cares about subsidies for the nuclear
power plant and low taxes for people making over $500,000 a year.
conversely the flanderses don’t care about corporate welfare and low taxes
for rich people, they care about prayer in schools and creationism and making sure israel
is in the hands of the jews so that the rapture will finally happen.
cletus and brandene care, to put it in cletus’ own words ‘about brandene being
in i-raq protecting us from 9-11’.
and grampa simpson and the people in the retirement home care about medicare
and making sure brown and tan people stay out of america.
and it’s all kind of falling apart.
the flanderses like mike huckabee, mr burns likes mitt romney, cletus and brandene don’t know who they like but they know they don’t like hillary cos she wants to kill christmas, and grampa simpson likes john mccain cos he’s over 70 and doesn’t take sass from the young people.
the evangelicals(the flanderses)are the most volatile, cos they REALLY care about their agenda
and they have great antipathy and distrust for anyone who slightly disagrees with them and they have a fairly inflated sense of their voting power(an evangelical leader once said ‘we own the republicans, without us they’re nothing’.).
it’ll be interesting to watch the race proceed. thus far it just seems schizophrenic on the gop side.
and isn’t it odd that the majority of republican candidates and pundits either live or work in democratic states, specifically nyc?
anne coulter and rush limbaugh and bill o’reilly and sean hannity and rupert murdoch and mitt romney and the majority of the bushes and etc all, for the most part, spend most of their time in or around nyc, the most liberal city in america.
and yet the republican lumpen still think that the aforementioned gop cabal are still ‘one of us’.
how would lefties feel if all of their pundits and candidates all lived in oklahoma city or dallas or mobile, alabama?
to the few gop-eople who come here, doesn’t it make you think that your pundits and candidates might just be a little bit disingenous when they spout anti-liberal vitriol but they choose to live and work in the most liberal city in america?
just a thought.
moby