John Boehner's Monster

I have to tell you, Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.

Quick, who said that?

Senator Obama is a decent person.

You don’t have to be scared of him as president of the United States.

Stumped?

I’ll give you a hint: It was at a campaign stop in Minnesota during the 2008 presidential campaign, and the guy who said that got loudly jeered.

Senator Obama is a decent person, you don’t need to be afraid of him.

The crowd booed and yelled out “Oh come on!” and “terrorist!” and “Liar!”

They were terrified of Barack Obama and they weren’t going to be mollified.

Figured it out, have you? Of course, it was Senator Obama’s chief rival for the White House, Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain. 

I have to tell you, Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.

Heh.

2008 was an ugly, ugly election.

And that, right there, was one of its ugliest moments.

The country was crashing into a recession that showed every sign of becoming another Great Depression.  America was at war, two wars in fact – ugly, brutal, horrible wars. America needed a leader, somebody they could believe in, somebody to give them hope and inspiration. And John McCain, whatever his virtues, has all the warmth and charisma of a spiny sea cucumber.  McCain sure wasn’t a Reagan, he wasn’t going to win the vote with his movie star charm and confident smile. Hell McCain wasn’t even a George W. Bush (speaking of cold flopping fish).

They needed another Reagan, they got Johnny Walnuts.

When John McCain speaks he sounds exactly like what he is, a garrulous grumpy old man whose hemorrhoid medication isn’t up to the task of keeping his asshole in check. 

Worse, unlike 2000 and 2004 when the Democrats fielded bland wooden candidates, in 2008 Barack Obama was young, dynamic, warm, charming, well spoken, handsome, fresh, new, inspiring, and basically everything McCain wasn’t. 

The GOP wasn’t even a little bit happy with their candidate, but, barring a stroke brought on by an extended bout of cloud shouting, at that point they were stuck with him.

They were stuck with McCain, and he for damned sure wasn’t going to get elected on his charm and likability.

McCain sure wasn’t going to get elected on his record. In fact, the less said about that, the better.

And, let’s be honest, McCain wasn’t going to win the White House on his education and intellect - not that Americans have ever elected their leaders based on, you know, education and intellect.

The Republican Party didn’t like McCain. Conservatives didn’t like McCain. Libertarians didn’t like McCain. Liberals didn’t like McCain. Nobody liked McCain. But they were all stuck with him (though, amusingly enough, four years later, they managed to find a guy even more unlikeable than John McCain, something I didn’t think was possible in 2008).

Hell, most of the time it would appear that John McCain doesn’t much care for John McCain.

So what do you do?

What do you do when you’re stuck with an unlikable candidate? What do you do when you can’t rebrand him, can’t make him more hip and affectionate and heroic – even if you give him a comedic sidekick.

Well, you do what political parties always do in that situation, you admit you’ve got a shitty candidate and then you try to make the other guy look worse.

Sure, our guy sucks, but the other guy sucks even worse!

Sure, our guy shouts at invisible people in the sky, yeah,but the other guy isn’t even an American! That’s right, he’s a gay commie socialist Nazi from Kenya with a robot lizard brain from outer space who travelled through time in order to destroy America! It’s true! It’s all true! And his wife hates white people! Ook! Ook!

By the time McCain got to Minnesota he and his political party had spent months plying the fears of their base. In addition to the time-tested trope of equating liberals to communism and socialism and Marxism and totalitarianism and atheism and Satanism and whatever vaguely defined ism that happens to be handy, they pulled out the all the stops. The strategy meetings must have been like that scene out of Blazing Saddles where Hedley Lamarr demands his henchmen “round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists!” If Obama was talking about hope and change, these people were pounding the podium in gloom and pessimism.  They told conservatives that their worst fears would come true: America would be destroyed by the communists, the teetering banks would fail, the ruined economy would collapse completely, the poor would riot in the streets and slaughter all the God fearing white men and take their women and skull-fuck their babies. Oh the end times were nigh and it was all Obama’s fault. Vote for John McCain, sure he sucks, but Obama is the Anti-Christ, folks, the Anti-Christ!

And so, John McCain came to Shakopee, Minnesota on a campaign stop and there he made the mistake of handing his microphone to a sweet looking little old lady: 75 year old Gayle Quinnell, who said:

I don’t believe him. I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not, he’s uh, he’s not, he’s an Arab!

The look on John McCain’s face in that moment was exactly, exactly, the same as those white parents who engage in casual racism in the privacy of their own homes … and then one day, in the middle of some public place, their sweet little 4-year old points at a black man and loudly blurts out “Nigger!”

Oh, heh, heh, woo boy, sorry Mr. Negro, sir. Why, heh heh, I have no idea where he could have learned that word. Heh Heh.

No idea indeed.

Heh heh. Oops.

Right.

These people, they’re always shocked and dismayed and embarrassed when the hate and rage and naked fear they themselves created and encouraged boils over and the howling mob rises up and starts lighting shit on fire.

McCain snatched the microphone away from Quinnell and tried to walk back his own bullshit, “Ixnay on the Arabway!  No ma'am, He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."

The crowd at first appeared to applaud McCain’s response, but months of manufactured paranoia and fear aren’t so easily contained and it became obvious in short order they were actually cheering Quinnell’s drooling dementia. 

The crowd screamed their fear at McCain, throwing his campaign’s own words back at him, Liar! Terrorist! Muslim! Socialist! Arab!

A man shouted from the crowd "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight!"

"We want to fight. And I will fight," McCain promised. "But I will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments and I will respect him."

At which point he was soundly booed.

In that moment, you could actually see the last tiny wisp of John McCain’s tortured soul escape from its withered husk and drift up towards the light.

And the twisted monstrosity John McCain himself helped to build whole cloth from rotten scraps and bits of dead meat finally broke free of its chains and smashed out of the castle to roam the countryside terrorizing the villagers. And for the last six years it’s been bellowing in pain maddened rage and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Six years. Six fucking years of birth certificates and fake social security numbers and the imminent End of Days and Biblical Antichrists and teleprompters and FEMA death camps and secret reeducation centers and 911 truthiness and supposed gayness and Michelle’s sex change and Black Panthers and Tea Parties and Communists and Nazis and Socialists and Arabs and gun grabbing and Israel hating and death panels and painting over Old Glory on Air Force one and killing his own ambassadors and killing Breitbart and killing the kids at Sandy Hook and killing the soldiers at Fort Hood (twice) and NOT killing bin Laden and spilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico and HAARPing himself up a hurricane to punish New Jersey and disappearing Malaysian airliners and ordering IRS outrages and alien reptile lizards from the 4th Dimension and Sharia Law and, well, it just goes on and on and on.

Honestly, at this point, you’d be hard pressed to find something, anything, that Obama hasn’t been accused of.  By the ugly tentacled face of Dread Cthulhu, Folks, if Obama was even one tenth the evil mastermind these people have made him out to be, he would have herded us all into the ovens long ago.

Six years they’ve been telling us Obama is going to destroy America.  And every year it gets louder and more shrill and more strident and more panicked and more desperately insane.

And yet – and yet – far from an America destroyed, our nation has steadily improved day by day, month after month, year after year during the entirety of Obama’s Administration. We are better off here in the United States than we have ever been and better off than nearly anywhere else on the planet.

In much of the rest of the world the problems are starvation, hunger, malnutrition, pervasive poverty, epidemic disease, war, rape, terror, slavery, horrifying oppression, homelessness, murder, genocide, natural and manmade disasters in endless succession.

But here in the United States, we are so well off that our worst problem at present, the “crisis” that presently dominates our headlines, is that millions of the less fortunate desperately want to become Americans.

Think about that for a second, won’t you?

Today, we are so well off in America, that we actually have to invent things to be afraid of.

Six years and conservatives are running out of time and running out of insanity.

Six years they’ve been screaming that Obama is going to destroy America.

And yet – and yet – here we are.

There’s only two years left and what if America keeps improving? What then? What if Obama leaves office and the country is measurably better off than it was when he was sworn in?

That, that right there, is what keeps Republicans awake at night (well, that and gay prostitutes, but I digress).

Today, led by Speaker John Boehner, the House of Representatives votes to sue President Obama for not implementing Obamacare fast enough – a law Boehner himself has attempted to repeal or delay 52 times.

Boehner would have you believe that this isn’t about impeachment.

Of course, that’s exactly what he said about impeaching Bill Clinton – and then voted, loudly, to impeach Bill Clinton.

Paul Ryan would have you believe this isn’t about impeachment.

“I see this as a ridiculous game by the president and his political team to try and change the narrative, raise money and turn out their base for an upcoming election that they feel is not going their way. I’ll just leave it at that.”

Oh, ah, so, a “ridiculous” game is it?

Tell me, given the last six years, why shouldn’t Democrats, why shouldn’t President Obama, expect anything other than lunacy from Paul Ryan and his fellow Tea Partiers? After all, they’ve been calling for Obama’s impeachment since the day he was sworn in. Hell, a significant fraction of the crowd that Ryan runs with has vocally and repeatedly called for the President to be dragged from the Oval Office and hung from the nearest lamppost.  Ridiculous? In a political party made up of Birthers, Truthers, religious nutters, revolutionaries, extremists, bigots, conspiracy theorists, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, you go right ahead and tell me when it gets too fucking ridiculous, won’t you?

“He said we’re not going there. We’re not interested in that, there’s no way it would be successful. Most of this discussion is coming from the White House, and there’s no reason to talk about it.”

That was Louisiana Representative John Fleming, quoting the Speaker of the House.

We’re not interested in impeachment, because there’s no way that would be successful.  Funny, there’s no way voting to repeal Obamacare 52 goddamned times would be successful either, and yet here we are.

We’re not interested in impeachment … because there’s no way that would be successful.

Because there’s no way that would be successful.  Keep that in mind, because that right there is the whole thing – Fleming let it out of the bag without realizing it. 

Because there’s no way that would be successful.

So, tell me again why I shouldn’t suspect the worst from these people? Go on, I’ll wait while you bullshit yourself up an answer.

Most of this discussion is from the White House.

Ah, and that’s what has conservatives upset.

Obama didn’t run from their threats. 

So sue me, Obama taunted them - and then he smiled.

The Democrats are using conservative insanity to make money. Lots and lots of money. Boy, that’s got to chap those clenched little GOP asses, now doesn’t it?  Especially since the Republican Party has been using this same threat, fueled by their ridiculous conspiracy theories, to milk money out of conservatives for the last six years. 

Sure sucks when the other guy beats you at your own game, don’t it?

And now? Now it seems that the shambling monster McCain let loose has returned, clomping along, leaking noxious fluids and dropping chunks of stinking dead flesh in its footsteps, bellowing insanely and making a mess of things.

Early last month, Sarah Palin’s PAC printed her op-ed on Breitbart, calling for, that’s right, impeachment of Barack Obama.

Impeachment.

And suddenly, there was John Boehner, looking all Cranky McWalnuts, Oh, heh, heh, woo boy, sorry. Why, heh heh, I have no idea, no idea, where little Sarah could have learned that word. Heh Heh.

Impeachment. Palin didn’t invent the idea – she has never had an original thought in her life. She’s just a screeching attention whore too damned stupid to realize she’s crapping all over her own party’s carefully laid plans – but then, that’s pretty much what she did to the McCain campaign, isn’t it? So nobody should be all that surprised.  Palin is only saying out loud what conservatives have been saying to themselves in private all along. These people, McCain, Boehner, Ryan, et al, they’re the white parents who use those words when they think they are alone. When they think nobody is listening.

They unleashed a monster and now they have the effrontery to act surprised when it bellows out their dirty little secrets.

Boehner doesn’t expect to win this lawsuit.

That’s not what this is about.

It’s about impeachment.

It’s about getting Obama out of office in disgrace before he doesn’t destroy the country.

They’re running out of time, the economy has recovered, the stock market is at all time highs, America is moving forward again. And they simply cannot, can not, allow that to be Obama’s legacy. He must be impeached and Boehner is testing the waters.

If Republicans take the Senate this year, you watch and see if the first order of business isn’t impeachment.

Don’t you believe for one goddamned second that this isn’t about impeachment.

That’s exactly what they are up to. 

Because if they don’t destroy Barack Obama before the end of his term, they will have to own their bullshit.

And nobody knows that better than John Boehner.

Except perhaps, John McCain.