ELECTION POSTMORTEM - IT IS NOT WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE…

by R J Shulman

 

SANTA FE, New Mexico – (PTSD News Service) – When I was much younger, a good friend of mine named Stu told me that the measure of being successful was not whether you win or lose, it’s how you shift the blame.  At the time, I laughed and thought that Stu was a funny guy.  After yesterday’s midterm election, I think that Stu was a brilliant guy. 

 

The Republicans took over the Senate, increased their lead in the House of Representatives, kept some awful governors and added a few new ones, all without presenting one cogent idea of how they would solve the nation’s problems if they were elected to serve the American public. In fact, issues the GOP is known to oppose, such as increasing the minimum wage, supporting cannabis legalization and use, and wanting increased gun background checks were ideas the American public soundly embraced while at the same time embracing the very candidates opposed to those ideas.

 

This has clearly been a remarkable achievement for the Republican strategists.  They knew that Americans were still hurting from the economic crash of 2008 which their policies of deregulation and unfettered speculation and endless wars caused.  The jobs that had come back were not as good as the ones that their economic polices gladly helped the ultra-industrialists ship to China.  They knew that Americans were sick of the grid-lock they created with their pledge to stop anything Obama wanted to do to leave him without a legacy.  They had achieved this unprecedented obstructionism with a record number of filibusters.  

 

But not to worry because all they had to do was to tell the American people again and again through the Fox News Propaganda Network, conservative talk radio and all those politicized churches that all of these problems were the fault of the BLACK man in the White House, and his affirmative support of all those BROWN people who had come over the border illegally, and the fault of the BLACK man in the White House’s support of those BROWN people in the Middle East who were beheading people and installing Sharia Law, and the fault of the BLACK man in the White House’s incompetence that allowed all one of those BLACK people to enter the United States with the Ebola virus and die from it.

 

Fox might as well have run a permanent headline at the bottom of their screen that said, “PRESIDENT BARACK EBOLA, WHO SPEAKS EBOLICS PLEDGES TO BRING ISIS FIGHERS TO AMERICA TO BEHEAD YOU AND TAKE YOUR JOB.   The rest of the gutless, corporate, journalism-free networks would then rush to have some Republican pundit on the Sunday morning news shows, so that the network’s good looking host could ask them just how much President Obama was going to be hurt politically by his failure to stop the rampant epidemic of Ebola that he had allowed to enter the United States while he was out playing golf, giving his wife a fist bumps all while wearing a tan suit.

 

Here is what is sure to come next.  The Republican congress will send President Obama a slew of budgets with heinous cuts to social security, Medicare, and a myriad of social programs while giving great tax breaks and the gift of deregulation to the ultra-wealthy and ultra-industrialists, all of which the majority of Americans would oppose, if they thought about it.  The question will be whether Obama will have a Rodney King why-can’t-we-just-all-get-along moment and sign off on these horrendous attacks on working people or whether he will grow a pair and just say no.   If he does the former, and the economy gets worse, like all of those Republican ideas will guarantee will happen, the GOP will then shift the blame to President Obama and the Democrats.  If it’s the latter, and Obama vetoes these hell-hole ideas, the GOP will shift the blame to President Obama and the Democrats by saying that nothing is getting done due to their unprecedented obstructionism.  And the networks will rush to have Republican pundits on their Sunday morning news shows so they can get asked by the network’s good-looking hosts, just how much these poor economic numbers or Presidential obstructionism will hurt the Democrats in the election of 2016.  The ink blots on the ballots of the mid-term have not quite dried and the GOP’s next shift has already started.

  

Yes, Stu, my friend, you were right.   In the midterm election, the Republicans have pulled off the greatest shifting of the blame onto others since a certain political party in 1930s Germany said that their country’s woes were caused by certain people who had an annoyingly high opinion of Moses.