Ryan + Romney = Irony

Just last year the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report licentiously entitled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.”  Now, the CBO is the very entity to which Congress itself appointed all economic analysis and budget score keeping, and which is generally regarded as nonpartisan and above-the-board objective.  The report revealed some rather damning “trends,” not least of which is that the 1 percent of the population with the highest income saw their after-tax household income grow by 275 percent, while the 20 percent of the population with the lowest income saw theirs spittle at 18 percent.  Indeed, while 99 percent of the American households saw their total market income decrease – cash wages, salaries, capital gains, etc. – the rich 1 percent actually saw theirs double. 

 

Bleakonomics 101 for 2012

Spoiler alert: this evening, during the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney, we’re going to hear a lot about jobs and numbers.  It might look something like this:

1 part BS + 1 part PR = 2night

Unlike the rogues gallery of incompetent candidates out of which Mitt Romney ascended to receive the nomination to run on the Republican ticket for the presidency of the United States, the man is at least qualified.  He governed a very Democratic state and did something or other to save the Olympics in the chosen land of his religion’s people, Salt Lake City.  But those are incidental bona fides.  Ask most people why they’ll vote for Mitt, and the response most probable is some wishy-washy allusion to his background in business, Herr Exekutive of Bain Capital; that, in other words, he knows how to create jobs.  Leaving aside this particularly spurious ascription, let’s take a look at what — not even who — does and doesn’t improve the unemployment rate, shall we?

 

Maksing Mitsakes [sic]

Oh, Mitt.  Buddy, just stop.  No, really.  Do yourself a favor and just drop out.  Do us all that favor.  I gotta break it to you: nobody likes you, man.  Nobody.  Just being honest.  Look, maybe it’s not your fault…  We all have bad days (though usually not week after week after week after week).  But you, you take the cake, pal!  How is it possible that you are so spectacularly incompetent!?  Seriously.  Newsflash: running for president is not rocket-science.  You show up, smile, say little, kiss babies, and make empty promises.  You eat a lot of bad food, take cat naps, and pander in the manner of a local yokel insert sports team or weather here as often as you can get away with it without coming off as cloyingly artificial and out of place.  But you can’t even do this.  You make Al Gore look like a hot-bodied rock star.  Shit, even Rutherford B. Hayes would tell you to quit being such a tightass.

 

From the Law Orifices of Bulschitz, Grin & Barrett

April 1st 2012: Torn between running for re-election as mayor of Milwaukee or getting a mulligan to run against Scott Walker again in a recall election for governor of Wisconsin, in a surprise move Democrat Tom Barrett left the jaws of pundits county- and countrywide dropping today by announcing that instead he plans on running against Barrack Obama to become the next president of the United States.

 

What’s Good for the Golden Goose…Not So Much the Michigander

Pompous hypocrisy and opportunism go hand in glove — or mitt, if you prefer.  In politics it is both a perk and a prerequisite.  There’s almost no such thing as a good slogan, soundbites are so ubiquitously regurgitated the words become reduced to drivel (to say nothing of the sincerity of the sentiment), and either we throw ourselves to the thrall of Revival-like electioneering crusades at the expense of our better judgment and reason, or we close our ears to it like classically trained cynics (no less at our rational expense); we tune in or tune out the tinny prattle of campaign patois, depending on our preset dials.  Along with the grandstanding, posturing, preening, and pandering, this is all to be expected.  But there is a tenuous snapping point to a candidate’s inconsistencies stretched beyond the torque of mere contradiction when he becomes not merely a raving, flaming, laughable fraud, but something troublingly worse: a man with no meaning.  Such is the rhetoric of Romney.