IT'S REVOLTING

“Shocked and Awed” is probably the best way to describe the reaction of the Republican establishment to the overwhelmingly, stunning victory of Barack Obama in his bid to retain the Presidency of the United States.  As the GOP and the right-stream media scramble to figure out how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in several US Senate races, along with the biggest American political prize, they remain stunned that the George W. Bush economic message, delivered by a wealthy businessman, failed to resonate with the American electorate.  Their failure to grasp control of the US Senate is certain to amend the GOP platform to preclude all future male candidates from ever mentioning the word “rape” on the campaign trail.

The demagoguery that was displayed throughout the 2010 mid-term elections that ignored a list of very impressive accomplishments during the first two years of the Obama administration, which diverted another great depression, failed to exact revenge against the President in 2012.  When the Tea Party and the extremists in the right-stream media hijacked cooler heads in the Republican Congress, things began to go south.  Common ground, cooperation and bi-partisanship became four-letter words in the GOP vocabulary.  The term “moderate” became synonymous with “terrorist collaborator.”  And Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, brazenly avowed that the number one priority of the Republican Party would be to deny Barack Obama a second term.

After a record number of Senate filibusters and, the epitome of government waste, 33 House votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the voting public was no longer buying  the Republican Party’s brand of tea.  Thus, on November 6, 2012, the Tea Party's platform and influence found its way to the bottom of Boston Harbor along with the presidential aspirations of Boston Harbor’s former governor.

The chameleon that was candidate Mitt Romney alternated his candidacy between his paid political campaign brain-trust and an extremist media whose hatred of President Obama has been on display since he dared to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2008.  There was no better evidence of this than the initial Romney response after Mother Jones released the, now infamous, 47% video.  The almost maniacal Obama haters such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity went on the air almost immediately and virtually demanded that Romney endorse every word spoken at that 47% fundraiser.  In addition to following Limbaugh’s severely flawed advice, Romney had his Vice Presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, echo that absurdly insensitive sentiment even after Ryan had been zealously campaigning to woo many of those 47% dependent on Medicare and Social Security.  Eluding those two, amid this tactic, is that they had classified Paul Ryan’s own mother, who campaigned with her son the candidate, as a freeloading taker.

In a matter of days, having realized that doubling down on their dismissal of 47% of America had been an unmitigated political disaster, Gov. Romney and Congressman Ryan  experienced a compassionate, conservative, religious epiphany.  Suddenly, the public learned that they were really concerned about helping 100% of the American people.  This was a clear indication that the GOP, after suffering major defeats in several burgeoning demographics, has to begin to expand their brand beyond the thoughts harbored by Fox News personalities and conservative radio’s myopic national and world view. 

The naiveté of Karl Rove, Dick Morris, and many Romney supporters and the hired brain-trust who have hitched their thought processes, political predictions and predilections to the sole sources of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and much of the right-stream media have awakened to a national phenomenon that most reasonable persons and pundits have seen coming for the last generation.  George W. Bush gathered 40% of the Latino vote and Ronald Reagan received a higher percentage of black votes than any of the most recent GOP presidential candidates.  The GOP's attempts at outreach is failing. 

 Lost among the conservative praise of the hero Ronald Reagan, is the fact that he and George Herbert Walker Bush operated in a dying Cold War world - and that they both raised taxes.  Also lost in the racially coded meandering rhetoric of anti-Obama Romney surrogates such as John Sununu and the egomaniacal Donald Trump, who avers that the 2012 election was a sham and that there needs to be a revolution, is that we are in the midst of a revolution.  The revolution is being televised.  And it is being waged by the 99%.