The War Is Over, But The Battle Rages On…

And then there were, er, uh, two?

Two actual GOP candidates I mean. 

And one of the two is Ron Paul, so technically it’s really just Mitt Romney.

Or is it?

 

Santorum’s out. For sure. Sort of. Maybe.

“We made a decision over the weekend that, while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting."

We’re not done fighting.

But, we will suspend our campaign.

Santorum is out like Newt Gingrich is out.  Like Michelle Bachmann is out.  Like Rick Perry is out.  Like Herman Cain is out. 

They’re out. But they’re not out out. They quit, but they didn’t quit quit.

They lost, but they’re still fighting. 

Kind of like their queen,

It may be tempting and more comfortable to keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand [that you] sit down and shut up, but that’s the worthless easy path. That’s a quitter’s way out

That was Sarah Palin, during her resignation speech when she quit her job as Alaska State Governor on July 3, 2009

It’s over, but we’re not done fighting?

We’re done, but we’re not done.

We quit, but we didn’t actually quit.

What the hell does that even mean?

Honestly, suspend? We suspended our campaign. It’s so totally not like quitting.  We’re not running for office any more, but we didn’t quit. No no, quitting is for quitters.  We not quitters, we suspended our campaign. We’re suspenders. 

Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and now Santorum all “suspended” their campaign.

Then they all vowed to keep fighting (just like they all vowed to go all the way to Tampa, but I digress, as is my wont).

Refresh my memory, aren’t these the same people who so utterly despise “political correctness” and who pride themselves on “saying it like it is” without sugar coating? Really aren’t these those people?

Why the hell can’t they just admit that they lost and they are now quitting?

Honestly, I think there needs to be some kind of federal law or Constitutional amendment or a Fatwa from His Humungous, the Pope, or something that compels politicians to stand in front of a camera and say this exact line, “I quit.  I am defeated. My campaign is over. I concede. I have lost.  I am a loser. I was beaten. I am no longer a candidate. I am a worm.  I am lower than whale turds on the bottom of the sea.  I have lost, lost, lost.  I will now slink home where I will sit in my darkened living room wearing nothing but a pair of dirty boxer shorts and watch reruns of SpongeBob Squarepants while moaning like a small child with a belly ache. I will drink cheap red wine straight from the box and go unwashed and cry until my wife brings me a grilled cheese sandwich with the crust trimmed off and some Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O’s with the little cut up weenies in ‘em.”

Then they should be publically marked with a large “L” drawn on their foreheads in indelible black Sharpie Marker and be forced to wear their underpants on the outside of their clothes for a year whenever they are out in public.

I guarantee that a law like that would dramatically cut down on this “suspend” bullshit. 

Yes, yes. I’m an idea man, everybody says so. Make sure they spell my name correctly on the Nobel, my middle name is “Goddamned.”

The battle is over.

But we’re going to keep fighting.

What? Like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find in a cave on some long forgotten South Pacific island fifty years after World War II ended? All wild-eyed and bearded and raggedy-assed, living on rats and drinking his own piss. Still fighting for a long defunct Emperor and a nation that had been burned to the ground and rebuilt as a country that makes fuel-efficient cars, creepy Anime porn, and music that sounds like a cat and a fire alarm in a blender? Like that? Is that how they’ll “keep fighting?”  Because I would totally pay to see Rick Santorum drink his own piss, I’m just saying.

Santorum didn’t give a reason for his non-quitting campaign suspension. 

The press seems to think it was because of his daughter, Bella, who has a rare genetic disorder and was hospitalized over the weekend. As a parent myself, I’m sure Santorum loves his daughter with all of his small calloused heart and her welfare is of the utmost importance to him and I think he’s perfectly sincere when he says so. And if he did quit because he puts the welfare of his family over his own ambition, well, you know, good on him.  But I think that ship sailed about six months ago,  his daughter didn’t just get sick, she’s been sick since the moment she was conceived and she’s always going to be sick despite all the prayers to the Great Bird of the Universe to make it otherwise – well, unless secular science and the Satan-spawned stem-cell medical research Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in finds a cure, but I digress yet again.  His daughter’s tragic illness is nothing new, and I seriously doubt that it was the reason for Santorum’s decision to suspend his campaign even if his campaign does decide to officially use her as an excuse.  I have no proof of this, of course, but I strongly suspect that like the other ego-driven jackasses who have also recently fallen off the GOP bug-wagon on the way to Crazytown, Santorum bailed out so that he could claim that he went out a winner.  I think he quit, ur sorry, suspended his campaign because the polls in Pennsylvania were looking pretty damned grim for Rick Santorum.  These are the folks who know Santorum the best, and they’re the ones who handed him a big pink slip after his second term in the Senate. It’s not his daughter, it’s his ego, he just can’t stand the thought of having to admit he lost. To Romney. In his own home state. Even Gingrich didn’t have to suffer that indignity. If Santorum can’t even win over his own neighbors, hell, his own family, on his own home turf, it’s going to be damned hard to avoid having to drink his own piss on national TV.  But if he bails out now, before Pennsylvania, he can claim that he left on his own terms, i.e. as a winner – which is a lot like running the Boston Marathon for five miles, then stopping, doing a few stretches, and claiming victory by saying, “hey, at least I didn’t end up puking on myself in the middle of the street in front of my own children. I’ve still got my dignity, man, and that makes me a winner. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go give the actual winner some advice on winning…”

We will suspend our campaign.

But, we’re not done fighting!

Honestly, what the hell?

What if we actually did business that way? No really, what if we all behaved like this? As a society? What if civilization operated like some institutionalized version of Road Rage? What? You beat me to the exit?  You passed me? You cut me off? Oh no you didn’t girlfriend!  Why you dirty rotten son of a bitch! Now it is so totally on!

I know by definition we’re all supposed to be adults here, but we’re just going to go on acting like petulant children. Why not.

What if we approached civil rights like this? Sure the marches and protests and court cases are long over. We know what the right thing is.  Everybody is equal, sort of, and yeah, sure we voted for segregation and Separate But Equal and George Wallace, and sure we ended up on the wrong side of history.  But you know what? We’re just going go right on hating people based on their skin color and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation and we’ll just keep right on trying to deny them an equal share of society. Yep. The war’s over, but we’ll just keep right on fighting for something we know is wrong.

Damned straight.

Or say the environment?  Oh yes, sure, okay, turns out that you can’t just keep dumping sewage and heavy metals and industrial waste into the water supply without consequence.  Turns out that natural resources aren’t, in fact, infinite. Turns out that if you destroy enough of an environment or kill enough of something, it goes away forever and God doesn’t just wave his big juju magic God stick and make more.  Sure, ok, we’ve seen enough dead lakes and Exxon Valdezes and Love Canals and Cancer Alleys and superfund sites and Dustbowls and mid-ocean garbage patches and Great Irish Potato Famines and deep water oil well blowouts and Salton Seas and droughts and plagues and famines to know that we can’t just keep shitting in our own nest without consequences. Sure we get that, but we’re just going to keep acting like we can because despite all evidence to the contrary and a thousand years of recorded human history and thousands, hell millions, of examples to the contrary we’re going to believe that industry will regulate itself.  In our best interest.  Just because.

Drill, Baby, drill.

And not only industry, Wall Street too.  Sure, despite the catastrophic implosions of unregulated markets during the 1720 Mississippi Bubble, or the Great Panic of 1819 (and 1837, 1847, 1857, 1884, 1893, 1896, 1901, and 1907), followed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which plunged the world into the Great Depression, the recession of 1937, Silver Thursday and Black Wednesday, the Dot Com Bubble, and don’t forget the Housing Market Crash, and the recent Not-So-Great Recession, what we need here is less regulation. Sure.  Because banks and business can regulate themselves and what’s good for them is good for us. We need to get out of the way of the job creators, like Lehman Brothers and Enron and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and, well, we’ll keep fighting for those corporate citizens, because they’re people too you know.

And you know what else those citizens need?  More tax breaks. Sure thirty years it’s been now and so far trickle-down economics has mostly trickled from the billionaires to the millionaires, but sooner or later, yeah baby, it’ll trickle right on down to us peons. You just wait. Any minute now Reagonomics is going to pay off big time. Any minute now. And sure, those rich bastards have been basking in the Bush era tax cuts for a decade now, and so far instead of creating jobs they sent about six million of them overseas or liquidated them all together, but man, you know what they need? More tax breaks. Then they’ll create some jobs. You’ll see.  Hey, only in a great country like America would unemployed folks whose jobs were sent to India be out in the street wearing Tri-Corner hats and demanding tax breaks for Millionaires.

Seriously, is this a great club or what?

Hey, here’s some good news, we got the Israelis and the Palestinians to sign another peace treaty! Because, this time, this time, man, Hamas won’t suddenly start lobbing rockets into Jewish towns and Hezbollah won’t decide to detonate a car bomb in downtown Tel Aviv or a bunch of Orthodox Jewish extremists won’t suddenly decide they just have to build a new settlement right smack in the middle of some Arab’s olive orchard.  This peace treaty is signed but we’re just going to go right on doing the same stupid shit and killing the same people and hating each other. Because that worked out so well up to now.

And speaking of bombing the Third World into democracy, sure we damned near bankrupted ourselves by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, but you know what would pay that right off, invade Iran! Peace through more war.  Of course, sadly, the war is over.  We didn’t win, but, heck, we’re not gonna lose either.  Now, we could have peace and get on with the business of rebuilding the country.  Sure, we could do that … or, we could just keep blowing shit up anyway. Maybe strap on some C4 and go light that sucker up in the middle of the market place. Keep shootin’ people randomly.  You know, like that.  We quit, but we didn’t quit quit if you know what I’m sayin’. And a hundred years from now the Iraqi equivalent of Rednecks will still be driving around Bagdad with Saddam Hussein’s flag plastered across the back window of their pickup trucks and explaining to everybody that will listen how denying Shi’ites equal rights isn’t really, actually, bigotry, it’s just a symbol of our history, man. 

Oh, yes, let us have some more of that.

 

You know, on second thought, it’s probably a good thing we don’t run civilization like these silly self involved bastards run campaigns, eh?

What?

Oh.

Right.

Damnit.

And then, this afternoon Newt Gingrich said despite suspending his campaign and bouncing checks to the state of Utah and having basically conceded, he was going to continue the fight. He said,

I want to keep campaigning!

Man, I really hope this doesn’t mean we’re all going to have to start drinking our own piss.

I’m just saying is all.