Well, the elections are almost a week behind us, and the country seems to have recovered from its political madness so it’s time for our new group of politicians, which actually looks a lot like our old group, to settle down and get to work.
Did we learn anything from the elections? I hope we did. There sure was a lot to learn. The left seems to have discovered that in order to win you have to function as a team, and not just a mass of individuals each seeking his or her own agenda. I really never thought that I would see Democrats completely subjugate their own individual aims and join forces the way they did in this election. Congratulations.
If you watched Fox news on election night you saw the mavens of the Right refuse to accept the facts. Karl Rove looked like a panic stricken Schmoo but then who wouldn’t if they’d just lost a half- billion dollar bet.
The Republicans learned that money doesn’t buy everything and that you can only fool all of the people some of the time. I have always thought of the Republicans as the more functional, if more deluded party, which wasn’t proven out by this election. The Democrats completely out functioned them on the ground, building and maintaining a much stronger, much more professional, political machine and even more important, the Democrats approached the nuts and bolts of the election from a much more pragmatic point of view. They put a guy named Nate Silver, a mathematician in charge of their number crunching. On the other hand the Republicans appeared to get their numbers from either Michele Bachman or Pat Robinson and we all know how that had to work out.
One of the great pleasures of the Obama landslide, was watching all that oligarch money, go to waste. It wasn’t all pleasure though, more like watching your ex-wife drive over a cliff… in your brand new Rolls. Watching all that money, fail to achieve anything was exhilarating but also very depressing. Just think of how much good that money could have done if placed in the right hands. I think it’s important that this waterfall of wasted funds isn’t repeated. Unfortunately, expecting the men who have the money, and who throw it away so effortlessly, to have any serious moral responsibility about it isn’t realistic, so I would like to see a change in the tax code that would deal with this onerous situation; something that would include items like.
No organization should be allowed to collect money, tax free, unless they can prove that said money will be dispersed for IRS approved charitable purposes. Political giving would not be one of those approved purposes. Political giving of any kind, because it implies a benefit to the giver, should not be considered charitable giving for tax purposes.
All PACs must be registered with the IRS and 50% of all dollars that pass through them must be dispersed to IRS approved charitable organizations or the IRS will treat such funds as regular income to the PAC and it will be taxed before dispersal at the highest current rate. Of course a couple of new judges n the Supreme Court who would see the idiocy of the Citizens United reversed decision would help too.
None of these ideas would stop what happened at this election entirely, but they would slow it down and help to assure that at least some of the money being thrown away by billionaires to garner political control of our government would be put to good use.
The big question coming out of the election seems to be, have the Republicans seen the light? Right now it seems not. You listen to Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh and you know that the Right hasn’t learned anything. They think they lost because there are too many people out there who want things. Ask Bill O’Reilly. They think that trickle down economics really do work. They think that the government should stay out of their lives and yet they want the right to intrude on women’s bodies, to keep loving people of the same sex apart and to alienate half their constituency by pushing their altogether regressive immigration laws.
They think that because they are fiscal conservatives and they go to church on Sunday that they are entitled to our vote. They never consider that no one in their right mind wants to vote for a bunch of anti-minority, sexist, bible thumping bigots whose only claim to fame is being the butt boys of the super rich.
McConnell is particularly clueless. He just doesn’t see that if he goes back to his obstructionist, anti-people program he will, in two years, have Ashley Judd taking his Senate seat away and shoving it up where the sun don’t shine.
A year ago John Boehner had to bite his tongue and eat the crow dished out by the obstructionist idiots of the far right. If he, once again, checks his balls at the door, and allows himself to be pushed around by these bumbling dunderheads, neither he nor they will be around for 2015. The house cleaning isn’t finished. There are still a lot of functional Democratic women who haven’t, as yet, had a shot at the congressional seats for which they lust.