This Year's Holiday Gift Guide

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Black Friday is now past. Cyber Monday, when we’re supposed to rush online for the great bargains, is behind us as well. But you’ve still got a few gifts to get for that hard-to-shop-for person on your list.

Well, never fear, gentle readers: As always, your Humble Columnist is here with your Holiday Gift Guide:

— For that right-winger who still can’t seem to face the fact that President Obama actually won the election fair and square, there’s the Wingnut Virtual Reality Helmet.

Slide this bucket-shaped gizmo over your head, and the built-in, form-fitting goggles will broadcast an endless feed of Fox News directly into your eyeballs, while the patented ear buds keep you from hearing any actual facts by filling your ears with a 24/7 feed of right-wing talk radio.

Why go through the painful and messy process of self-examination? Why risk the hard work of changing your attitude and your message when you can bathe in the warm reassurance of people telling you that you were right all along, there’s nothing wrong with your thinking, and it’s Those People who have stolen the country from you?

(Warning: Some users have reported experiencing fear, paranoia and uncontrollable fits of rage from overexposure to Fox News.)

— Depressed and apprehensive about the threatened collapse of the Hostess Company and its fine collection of chemically ageless snack cakes? Sad that your children may never experience the special spongy taste of the Twinkie and its creme-filled goodness? Get them the new Hasbro Easy-Bake Home Twinkie Oven.

Make your very own Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Mini-Muffins, and of course, classic Twinkies, right there in your own home! Comes with detailed recipes and a special bonus supplement teaching the little ones to blame unions if things don’t come out right because of their incompetence.

(Warning: Handling of some of the preservatives, colorings and artificial flavorings necessary to make these confections may require EPA certification. HazMat suit not included.)

— An important life skill in today’s world is that of being able to make yourself feel better about your life by watching other people who are way more dysfunctional than you.

Which is why the folks at TLC Network have created the perfect learning tool for your little ones: The Honey Boo Boo Action Play Set.

The set contains uproariously lifelike figures of TV’s beloved Shannon/ Thompson clan: Mama, Daddy, Jessica, Anna, Lauryn and, of course, the heavily caffeinated, adorably demented redneck pre-teen beauty queen herself, Alana “Honey Boo Boo Child” Thompson.

Squeeze Alana’s belly fat and hear her say one of the show’s delightful catch phrases, like “a dolla makes me holla!” and “you better redneck-ognize!” Manufacturer is not responsible for the eventual withering of your soul.

— Apps, applications that run on smartphones and some laptop computers, are likely to be huge sellers this year. For those friends or relatives whose casual and unrecognized racism makes you cringe, there’s the Racism Recognition App for iPhone and Android smartphones.

This handy program is voice-activated and delivers a small but noticeable electric shock to people saying certain racist catch-phrases and code words like, “I know it isn’t politically correct to say this, but…”; “Why haven’t we seen Obama’s college transcripts?”; and “Obama doesn’t represent the real America.”

— If you or someone you love is a Christmas Warrior, someone for whom the holiday is not complete unless they can feel persecuted and oppressed by people saying “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” instead of “Merry Christmas,” there’s now an entire line of Christmas Warrior cards and decorations.

The cards include such heart-warming messages as “Merry Christmas. Yeah, I Said It. Merry Christmas! So What Are You Going to Do About It, Punk?” For only $99.99, you can get the full-sized nativity scene with all of the characters defiantly flipping off anyone who has a problem with it.

Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays — however you say it — try not to be a jerk about it, OK? And God Bless Us, Every One.

Benghazi: No Magic Bullet

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You know, there are a lot of legitimate concerns that could be raised about what happened on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya, when our popular ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans were killed by a group that attacked and sacked the U.S. consulate there.

Was it a mistake to have so much of the consulate's security provided by local forces and a nearby group of CIA employees, rather than, say, the U.S. Marines? Should we have had a military response force located close enough to get there more quickly?

Republicans, however, seem to be determined to ignore these very real questions. This may be because "since gaining the majority in 2011, House Republicans have voted to reduce embassy security funding by approximately half a billion dollars below the amounts requested by the Obama administration."

That language comes from a report issued by the very committee investigating the attacks and the U.S. response to them. "You have to prioritize things," shrugged Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, one of the lawmakers who voted to cut funds for embassy security - and who's now helping to lead the committee.

Well, that's true, and it's become crystal clear what the Republican priorities are: not getting at the truth, but desperately trying to find their "magic bullet," the scandal that will bring down the man they love to hate.

All of their previous attempts - Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the DOJ's settlement of a Bush-era civil action against the New Black Panther Party - none of these have managed to gain any traction. But this! This, they thought, was going to be the one.

Mitt Romney got the ball rolling. Before the bodies were cold, he was releasing critical statements in the mendacious and fact-free style that characterized the entire campaign. He accused Obama of expressing "sympathy" for the attackers and for responding to the attacks by "apologizing for our values." The fact that the president had done no such thing didn't matter to Lord Romney, whose disdain for the President was only exceeded by his disdain for the truth.

In the days leading up to the election, Benghazi became the right-wing obsession. Mention anything, anything at all, and they'd start yelling at the top of their lungs that "Obama lied about Benghazi."

"Obama is leading in the swing states ..."

"HE'S LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI!"

"The heads of the car companies say Romney's lying about moving auto jobs to China ..."

"THAT'S NOT AS BAD AS OBAMA LYING ABOUT BENGHAZI!"

"Would you like another piece of toast?"

"I BET OUR AMBASSADOR IN BENGHAZI WOULD HAVE LIKED TOAST, BUT OBAMA MURDERED HIM, THEN LIED TO COVER IT UP!"

And so on.

But as hearings ramped up and people who actually knew things began to speak, it became more and more obvious that there really was no scandal there. No one, as the conspiracy theorists claimed at first, had told U.S. forces to "stand down" rather than help the beleaguered ambassador. President Obama had immediately referred to the attacks as an act of terror, despite Romney's brazen attempt to lie about it at the second debate.

Then things just got silly. Sen. John McCain skipped a closed-door briefing about Benghazi to hold a press conference demanding more information about Benghazi. He threatened to hold up a hypothetical nomination for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, because, he said, Rice "lied" about the motives behind the attack.

As it turns out, however, the "lies" Ambassador Rice were supposedly telling were actually information given to her by the CIA and vetted by "seven, eight, nine different agencies" before being approved in final form, again by the CIA. At least that's what Rep. Peter King described as the testimony from scandal-plagued former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.

This led to some rumblings that Petraeus' recent sex scandal arose out of some attempt by the administration to blackmail him. That line of attack went nowhere, probably because it made no sense. Then there was a claim that the White House had changed the ambassador's "talking points" to take out references to al-Qaida and make themselves look better.

This was immediately shot down by the office of the director of national intelligence in an interview with CNN, leaving poor Honorable John nothing left to gripe about but the fact that he had to see his hoped-for scandal shot to pieces on CNN.

As this scandal-that-isn't fades away, to become just another one of the Zombie Lies the right trots out again and again no matter how many times it's debunked, what's next?

Will President Obama be blamed for the death of the Twinkie? Will some small detail of the White House Christmas tree lead to outraged calls for his impeachment?

Stay tuned.

Is Our Republicans Learning?

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It's nearly two weeks after the presidential election and the "shocking" victory of Barack Obama over Lord Mitt, the Earl of Etch-a-Sketchington (shocking, that is, unless you were actually paying attention to the arithmetic).

Reading and watching the seemingly endless parade of analysis, recrimination and tantrums filling the media, one is compelled to ask, in the words of The Former President Who Must Not Be Named: Is our Republicans learning?

Well, I said last week that we live in hope. And there's been some reason to believe that maybe, just maybe, the GOP has taken some lessons from losing both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

For instance, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, the new head of the Republican Governors Association, gave an interview to Politico in which he candidly said that Republicans need to stop being "the stupid party."

Noting that some Republican candidates had damaged the GOP brand with "offensive, bizarre comments," Jindal insisted that "we've ... had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people, and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters." He urged the party to reach out to all Americans, "including the 47 percent and the 53 percent."

Erick Erickson, who built one of the most virulent nests of angry wingnuttery with his website redstate.com before becoming a regular contributor on the supposedly liberal CNN, pushed back against the crazies calling for states to secede. Barack Obama, he wrote, "did not win by stealing the election. ... He won by turning out the most people in a well-run campaign. In other words, he won fair and square."

Sadly, however, Jindal and Erickson may be lonely voices crying in the wilderness. Many prominent Republicans seemed determined to keep pushing the message that lost them the election: that Those People are coming to take your stuff.

Mitt Romney blamed his loss on the "gifts" that the president gave young, African-American, and Hispanic voters. Paul Ryan blamed the loss on an unexpectedly large turnout of voters in "urban areas," and we all know what that means, don't we?

The conservative media figures who did so much to insulate their right-wing audiences from reality were even more blunt. Bill O'Reilly went full-out racist, saying that the election was decided by African-American and Hispanic voters who "wanted someone to give them stuff."

Ann Coulter was practically in tears as she told talk show host Laura Ingraham: "We have more takers than makers, and it's over. There is no hope." Rush Limbaugh sarcastically suggested that the way to bring back women voters was for conservatives to "start their own abortion industry."

Here's a news flash, GOP: You're not going to win the votes of African-Americans, the majority of whom are working people, by acting like all anyone darker than you wants to do is lie around the projects collecting welfare and committing voter fraud. You're not going to win the votes of Latinos by backing laws that assume that every one of them is illegal until they prove otherwise.

You're not going to win the votes of young people by acting as if the desire for educational opportunity makes them parasites, and by the way, that their openly gay and lesbian friends are abominations before God. You're not going to win the votes of women if you insist that their desire that the insurance they work or pay for covers contraception makes them lazy sluts who want free birth control pills so they can have sex all day.

This should not be hard to figure out. You don't win elections by insulting the people you need to vote for you. If you offend a sufficient number of minority groups, pretty soon you've offended a majority.

Republicans may try to take comfort in the fact that they held on to control of the House of Representatives.

But that doesn't mean that the "white makers vs. the grasping dark hordes" message is going to suddenly turn into a winner in 2016.

You may be able to hang on to a House seat in a district gerrymandered to put people who look, talk and think just like you in one place. But it won't win you the Senate or the White House. That requires outreach to all Americans. Just ask Paul Ryan, who held his "safe" House seat while losing his home state.

In a changing America, conservatives will win few victories by professing their love of country while openly loathing more than half of the people who live in it.

Life Of Illusion (The Director's Cut)

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[Note: this is the unedited version. The one in the paper eliminates the first paragraphs because the editor was afraid the Party of Love might firebomb the newspaper office.] 

So now, at long last, the election is over, and President Barack Obama will have his second term. Before we get to our discussion of what happened and why, let me just take the time to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

Ahem. On to the post-election analysis.

I’ve said before that Mitt Romney was destined to be the John Kerry of the Republican Party. Each man was a rich, entitled Massachusetts moderate trying to convince his party's skeptical base he was one of them, despite having once supported the thing that that base purported to despise most (the Iraq War in Kerry's case, the individual mandate in Romney's). Both Kerry and Romney ran against controversial incumbents, with a central message that amounted to “I’m not him.” And both fell short. But Mitt Romney fell much shorter than Kerry. Why? Perhaps because the “him” Romney was running against didn’t exist.

The imaginary Barack Obama that the Republicans were running against bore little or no resemblance to the actual man in the White House. Imaginary Obama was a scowling, far-left radical, a socialist, a fascist or a communist, depending on who was yelling into the mike at the time. Imaginary Obama was simultaneously an evil schemer who was plotting 24/7 to destroy America and a guy who was too dumb to get into college without affirmative action or to speak without a teleprompter. Imaginary Obama was a divisive, harshly partisan figure, hated by all, even his former supporters. Worst of all, he was an incompetent, a miserable failure at absolutely everything he touched.

The problem with this strategy is that the actual Barack Obama that non-delusional people could see was a smart, calm, moderate with good likability ratings who’d brought the unemployment numbers down at a steady if sometimes maddeningly slow pace, saved the auto industry, and brought Osama bin Laden to justice. People heard the Right dismissing every bit of good news, crying doom and gloom, and insisting “everything’s getting worse,” looked around, and went, “hmmm, it really isn’t.”

Then along came Sandy. The quick Presidential response to the hurricane and the grateful reaction of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who only a few weeks before had been savaging Obama at the GOP convention, blew away any lingering doubts non-delusional voters may have had about both the President’s competence and his ability to work with Republicans.

As the polls showed the President pulling further and further ahead in crucial swing states, Republicans began pulling the blanket of delusion over their heads. Pundits like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michael Barone and even the usually sane George W. Will predicted a Romney landslide, with Will predicting 321 EVs for Romney.

 One expects this sort of thing from hacks like Morris, Barone and Rove, but Will really should have known better. The polls were “skewed,” they insisted, because they assumed that Democratic voter turnout would be the same in 2012 as it was in 2008. That wasn’t going to happen this year, they asserted with the all the misguided and uninformed bravado of a latter-day George Armstrong Custer.

Actually, had you asked earlier in the year, I might have said you had a point. There were a lot of disaffected Democrats, particularly on the Left. (Anyone who says liberals all think the same has clearly never been around any). But that was before the GOP, some of its prominent supporters, and its candidates began taking extreme radical positions on things like abortion, contraception, gay rights, and immigration, and saying things that frightened, offended or ticked off Latinos, LGBT people, African-Americans, and especially women. That fired up the very constituencies the GOP had told themselves would stay home.

So thanks, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, John Koster, Richard Mourdock, etc.! You fired liberals up and damaged the GOP brand with moderates, probably for years. And right wingers, dwelling as they do in their tightly woven cocoons where only Fox News and talk radio can penetrate, never even saw it. They still don’t. But numbers really don’t lie.

Now that the Republican leadership has failed in their stated number one goal of making Barack Obama a “one term president,” what will they do? Will they actually start pushing bills other than futile grandstanding attempts to “repeal Obamacare”? Will they actually deal in good faith on the budget?

Well, we live in hope. But first they’re going to have to do is stop deluding themselves that everyone hates the President and the Democrats as much as they think they do and that they’ll be rewarded for obstructionism. Reality, it’s said, has a well-known liberal bias, but it’s still reality. 

What a Guy

The last days of Romneyland - First Read

"Ann Romney's remarks brought several staffers to tears as she told the assembled group that they would always be part of the fabric of the Romney family."

But: 

"Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked."

Why November? Why Tuesday?

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As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the Northeast, more than a few people raised the question: What happens if the affected states are still wrecked by Election Day?

Would the election still go on? Could it? Would it be necessary to postpone it? Can you even do that? What plans are in place for the situation where a major disaster occurs on or about Election Day?

Taking the last question first, the answer is: None. And it doesn't look as if there are going to be any such contingency plan put in place in the foreseeable future. The U.S. Congress sets the day for the national election, and let's face it, they're not the most nimble or quick-moving of bodies on their best day.

Which raises another question: Why that day of all days? Why November, and why Tuesday?

The answers lie in the early days of the formation of our republic, when we were largely a nation of farmers. Congress established the "Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November" by a law passed in 1845.

Before that, the individual states could hold their presidential elections any time they wanted, so long as it was within the 34 days before the Electoral College met on the first Wednesday in December. Imagine what that would do to TV election coverage if they did it that way now. The reporters and pundits, poor dears, would be dead of exhaustion before it was all over. There'd probably be some disadvantages as well.

In any case, Congress decided to standardize the election system so that Election Day was the same all over. Remember that back then a lot of the population lived in rural areas, but did their voting in towns they could only reach by horse, mule, wagon or buggy. That took time.

The records of the congressional debate show that the legislators were aware of the challenges that created. November was not only within that 34-day window before the electors met, but it was also after the last of the harvest had been taken in, so a lot of people were going to be coming to town anyway. A day in November, therefore, still made sense.

To have Election Day on Monday, however, you'd have to make people travel on the Sabbath, so that was out. In most places, Wednesday was market day, when farmers were busy making their money selling the crop, then buying whatever they were going to need for the winter. Thursday was the day for traveling home, and everyone would want to be cleared out by Friday. So Tuesday it was.

In those days, Election Day was a festive event. There were speeches, bands and parades. People would get dressed up, socialize with their neighbors and, in a lot of cases, party like maniacs.

Today, several states mandate closing the bars and banning liquor sales on Election Day, but in the olden days, as far back as Colonial times, whiskey was as much a part of the day as brass bands and bunting.

For example, when George Washington ran for his first political office in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he neglected to wet the whistles of voters and was soundly trounced by his opponent, who supplied them with beer, wine, whiskey and rum punch. The next time he ran, Ol' George (a fast learner) rolled out the barrel, got everyone good and hammered, and won handily.

So now that we've transformed from a largely agrarian nation to one where a 40-plus-hour, five-weekday work week is more the standard, does it really make sense to only have voting on one day, a workday, when it can be a real hassle to go stand in a line and wait to vote - and it may be downright impossible, given the demands of many jobs, not to mention child care?

Well, no. It really doesn't. Many states, like our own North Carolina, have expanded absentee and early voting to extend the period in which voters may cast their ballot. Some states, like New Jersey and California, allow voting by mail. Oregon's gone even further: It conducts all its elections by mail.

We're moving the voting process from the 19th century into the 21st. The first thing to go, sadly enough, was the free booze. But now states are working on expanding access to the polls, which means that people have fewer and fewer excuses.

So, whoever you are, if you haven't done so already, get out there and vote. It's important.