Super Tuesday is behind us and John McCain, the Marshall of Tombstone, is now the Champion of the Wrong. Having swept all the major states, he emerged with a commanding two-to-one lead in delegates to the Republican National Convention over his nearest rival Willard “Mitt” Romney. Romney, discovering the next morning that he would have to win four fifths of the remaining delegates to be chosen, decided to withdraw from the race leaving what remains of his personal fortune intact and McCain as the odds-on-favorite to clinch the nomination.
The lead-belly conservative vote was almost equally divided between Romney and the Huckster, with Huckleberry taking Georgia, Alabama, West Virginia and Arkansas, demonstrating that most of us north of the Mason-Dixon and west of the Red River prefer our politics without benefit of clergy. Romney, winning little more than his ‘home’ states of Massachusetts, Michigan and Utah, did not emerge as a national candidate, demonstrating that America demands a sharp distinction between church and state. The fatal flaw of both of these candidacies was the assumption that the bible-thumping fundamentalist vote is such as to nominate and elect a president outright. This was the fraud perpetrated upon us by the likes of Messrs. Falwell and Robertson, and given credence by the cretin Rove who, acting as “Bush’s Brain”, convinced both the president and the country that the Christian conservative vote was such that no compromise with the rest of America was warranted. Both Mitt and the Huckster swallowed whole this fantasy of the ‘True Believers’ and assumed they could ride that elephant down Pennsylvania Avenue. But, alas, the blue smoke of the ‘Moral Majority’ has gone the way of ‘compassionate conservatism’; quaint oxymoron’s describing the common misunderstandings of ‘Ol Two-Cows’ America. This left both men high and dry; merely provincial spokesmen, masters each of his own little bayou, neither capable of swimming in the deep blue sea. So McCain, the aging Marshall of Tombstone, was left to put together a coalition of the weary, as if by default.
But all is not well in the belly of the beast. Loud groaning can be heard from the ‘Idiot Right’ as it tries hard to swallow and digest this latest news. Rusty, ‘Rush to Judgment’ Limbaugh has taken to the airwaves and Ann Coulter appeared before a Y.A.F. (Young Americans for Freedom, or is it Young Asses for Fascism) conclave howling in pain at the prospect of their movement being ‘stolen’ by a man who exhibits, all to frequently it seems, a disturbing propensity to recognize that there is demanding to be heard another, larger and more compelling America. And there are larger and more compelling problems that this nation needs to address, from the maldistribution of wealth to global warming, demonstrating that reality is indeed a liberal proposition. For no amount of incantation, admonition or prayer will stop the melting of the polar ice caps, the shrinking of the middle class, or the depletion of the world’s remaining petroleum reserves unless we—collectively—do something about it. This requires a New Deal.
It remains to be seen if the good Marshall can ride this pachyderm in anything other than endless circles.
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