I am inordinately proud of the British this morning, and in particular director Danny Boyle. His production for the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London was, to paraphrase Popdose’s own Kelly Stitzel, crazypants awesome. In one sitting you had the real Queen of England cavorting with the latest James Bond, Daniel Craig; then you had that same real Queen in the same space with The Sex Pistols song, “God Save The Queen” which is as close to a sentiment of love as a brushfire is to hypothermia. It was Voldemort and Mary Poppins and Paul McCartney and Blur and everything that could make an Anglophile lapse into a joy coma. The whole world and everyone in it would agree that, even at it’s most-inspired and ridiculous, it was everything an event like this could and should be. That is, everyone…except Willard.
Mitt Romney, a man that seemingly has a one-to-one shot at being America’s next president, decided much like his presidential predecessor George W. Bush that infuriating your international allies was a good idea. Okay, we know London’s been having some issues with this outing; the news reports have been almost gleefully poking sharp sticks at the misfortunes of our cousins across the way, and that’s mostly because modern news reportage is not nearly as tactful as a United States president (or presidential candidate). Oh…wait…
Yes indeed, one of Mitt’s first acts on the soil of the Crown was to criticize how things were going down over there, while at the same time patting himself on the back for the job he did whilst running the Salt Lake City variant. It was yet another expression of the wit, class, and sensitivity of a man who never had a great idea he didn’t disown later. I won’t go into the brewing twin controversies that A: he may have had far less influence on Salt Lake’s Olympics than he’s taking credit for (and because he’s a politician I am stunned, stunned, he would steal someone else’s glory for his own gain), and B: he may have been phoning it in and running Bain Capital at the time he did this, thereby nullifying the two achievements he purports to be basing his credibility upon.
A point of note here is important. I once worked for a company that was a long-time family owned business and things ran very well there. Once Bain Capital took over the place turned, as my Brit friends would say, to bollocks. Bain Capital was the meat grinder that slowly churned a once-thriving enterprise into a hiring-and-firing machine, and its cycles of employment opportunities lasted as long as your eligibility for benefits did. Are you getting close to the time of being eligible for the medical plan? Oh dear, we’re sorry to see you go. Here’s a cupcake and don’t let the automatic door give you a colonoscopy on the way out.
That unencumbered lack of charm seems to emit from Mitt an awful lot, like a guy that eats one too many protein bars. He projects a cloud of unlikeability that is just as noxious and flammable. The biggest problem is that his most ardent supporters are totally stoked for scorched-earth tactics, so they view explosive effluence as just ”keepin’ it real.”
Not that President Obama is any great shakes either. The first half of his term was a study in ”jerking that l’il feller around” by the likes of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Obama should have been able to have smelled what the Rock was cooking — Lord knows most of his faithful did — but no, he kept coming back for the smackdown. Worse, the Blue Dog Democrats were only too happy to tag team him as well. But let’s not dwell too much on that by cutting to the real issue here. When he was called upon to shore up American jobs, Obama focused his efforts with laser-like intensity on healthcare, and for the large number of unemployed Americans, it seemed he wasn’t fighting the right wrestling match. That’s why they’re angry: it seemed he was missing something so obvious. Problematically, if Romney becomes president, that one massive achievement will be repealed as a blood offering for Big Tea, never mind if it is working or not (or if repealing it and jerking around businesses instituting it right now would do ever more harm to the economy and ”job creators”). So let us not be blind to the reality that Obama hasn’t been a terrific president up to now. He’s been trying, but you only get 100-days to be the new guy. After that, you either wise up or accept you might be a one-term jabrony.
But we have Willard ”Mitt” Romney, who seems to get great joy in wiping his metaphorical nose with cash, only to soft-pedal away from his critics later. His constant verbal faux pas about all the stuff he’s got, and all the stuff you have not, and what supposedly he’s so good at and the like, has the effect of making you dislike him before he has even said anything. This is the memo I get from my conservative friends. They wonder aloud how the party they trusted would put up so many awful candidates during the primary season, each worse than the last, in some effort to rise above the Romney money machine. They’re all gone now, and their arrows have been refashioned as placard sticks holding the sign, ”He’s Our Man.” This is not uncommon, but for people who thought Mitt was so bad for the country a half-year ago, they sure did drop to his heels and kiss fast, didn’t they?
My friends are angry because they feel they’ve been sold out. They say, not only shouldn’t the RNC expect us to kowtow to Judge Smails, they should have insisted during the primaries that every one of that Confederacy of Jerk-asses be stricken from the prospects list. Voting for politicians (all politicians) is a lot like selling your soul on a layaway plan. You divide it up into payments, knowing what you are doing probably isn’t helpful, but allowing your disbelief a momentary suspension. Instead, they gave well-intentioned, well-meaning conservatives a band of bilge-barrel-bottom-sucking mouth breathers and told them to ”learn to love them. They suck, but you’re stuck. Fall in line or be a RINO.” In other words, my friends were not undone by the Democrats, but by their own in a Junior High School loyalties war.
How so? Time and again, Pres. Obama was giving up the farm and the cows and the chickens to get things done. The Grand Bargain would have been two-times more beneficial to the Republicans than the Democrats and may well have doomed an Obama second term then and there. They refused. He gave them what they wanted, virtually prostrate and genuflecting, and they refused. So no, this has nothing to do with working together. This is about obliteration, never talking to the enemy, driving them out, seeing them crushed before you and hearing the lamentations of Hillary Clinton (and the nauseating cackle of Michele Bachmann in rapturous victory pom-pom cheers).
I envision an America where we can go to other countries and inform them plainly that they are inferior to us on every level; an America where if you are a Muslim you are actually a terrorist even if you don’t know it yet; an America where I am just like you and my wife drives a couple Cadillacs out at the summer home and only has to deal with ”you people“ on holidays; an America where, if you’re sick, you should probably just go ahead and die already and decrease the surplus population; and certainly an America where I, as governor, can create a health policy that I am very proud of and then can, as presidential candidate, totally disavow it, and you as my loyal voting block will not dispute that I am goofing on you on an epic scale by perpetrating this. I can keep on shaking my Etch-A-Sketch if I must, but I’m confident you dimwits won’t remember what I do from one minute to the next so why waste the energy? To you Great Britain, I say, you funny-talking fellows sure don’t know how to run the Olympics, do you.
London Mayor Boris Johnson, Prime Minister David Cameron, and the legion of the U.K. proved otherwise with that magnificently loony opening ceremony and said plainly to Willard (but sanitized here), ”Why don’t you urinate off, you slur connoting the vagina?”
I couldn’t have issued that statement better myself.
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