Sunday American Rant

President Obama will appear at Osawatomie, Kansas on Tuesday. I thought Drudge told me he was going on a 14-day vacation. He was just here the other day for the tree-lighting ceremony. So people are puzzled by this trip to a state he didn't win and is unlikely to in 2012. I thought he was going to commemorate John Brown, the psychopathic abolitionist, but instead I was informed by Business Insider that he would deliver a roaring class warfare speech. Why would someone think that? Because the White House put out a press release to say that President Obama would be giving a major speech about the future of the middle-class in America and that his speech would commemorate Theodore Roosevelt's new Nationalism speech, where TR railed against Wall Street and American corporations and chided people for calling him a socialist.

In case you don't know, Newt the Cameleon in Iowa called President Obama a "full-blown Saul Alinsky radical". This is the resurgence of the Bad Newt. The Bad Newt has called President Obama a socialist trying to secularize America. We should remember Saul Alinsky's son broke into uncontrollable laughter with tears streaming down his face when this accusation was first brought against Obama.

Bad Newt has also surfaced with his dog whistles about poor people. Not only should the poor children clean toilets, but the poor are using food stamps to travel to Hawaii. I don't know whether Newt is subtly digging at Obama, who is supposed to be vacationing in Hawaii, or did Newt go back to the Welfare Queen file and updated the accusations the poor drove Cadillacs and turned it into Hawaiian vacations.

Newt was naughty on last night's Mike Huckabee lovefest where the GOP contenders battled with three extreme right-wing state Attorney Generals over policy. Newt contended that he and Heritage Foundation came up with the idea of the individual mandate in healthcare to block Hillarycare and that they never meant it to be taken seriously. What a whopper! Newt was for the individual mandate as late as 2008. Conservatives really did advocate individual mandates as part of their code for taking individual responsibility.

This last item shows you how far gone the so-called conservatives are. Conservatives created the idea of cap-and-trade, individual health care mandates and a host of other ideas, which President Obama thought he could use to gain bipartisan support for his policies. Little did he know that the Right would disavow much of their intellectual wares the minute he became President. And the Republicans have absolutely abandoned their hisoric role in backing infrastructure spending and their creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

I guess this is a result of post-retail politics, the existence of politicians and policy-makers in a self-enclosed glass headquarters removed from the everyday reality of American life. One breath of fresh air came yesterday as Mitt Romney's former business partner of 10 years at Bain Capital candidly admitted that he never thought they were in the "job creation" business as Romney pretends but in the business of making the wealthy wealthier.

The resurgence of Newt is not as unbelievable as common sense tells one. Newt is the composite of all the non-Mitts, including the sex scandals. Some wag said that Romney was the 1% and Newt was their lobbyist. But Newt's former Republican colleagues in the House are not amused. Senator Tom Coburn said it would hard to back Newt because of how he ran the House and his ethical lapses. Guy Molinari called Newt "an evil person" based on his political run-ins with him. Others said he was disdainful of his colleagues, arrogant and a know-it-all. Even Dana Rohrbacker scoffed at Newt's claim that he helped President Reagan defeat Communism. So far, the Obama campaign and the Democrats are simply waiting and watching as all of Newt's Republican,conservative former colleagues come out of the closet. Newt also has a problem with the Southern Baptists, who have called upon him to openly talk about his marital problems in a way that could persuade their congregations that he has repented.

Newt may have defied traditional political gravity. He is a candidate who owns nearly every trait or character flaw that has doomed past politicians. He may just have amassed so many character problems that he has hit the critical mass where it simply doesn't matter anymore to the average voter. If I can walk into a bookstore today and see Kim Kardashian have a novel out, then American culture has gotten so polluted that a seriously and fatally flawed candidate could make it like a Reality Television Show.

Maureen Dowd takes on Newt's love affair with his own mind in today's column "Out of Africa and into Iowa", which explores the funky and idiosyncratic mind of Newton Leroy McPherson.

Perhaps Newt is the political prophet of our time with his creation of Newt,Inc., his conglomerate of think tanks and book and film publishing ventures. In other words, all of politics has been marketized and the traditional categories of political science are dead and gone.

Senator John McCain today raised the voice of the past--not his own but what we used to consider politics. John thought the Republicans were having too many debates and he also said that candidates should back off the anti-immigrant rhetoric because New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado were in play because of the GOP's harsh words against Hispanics. While I agree with his attitude, I don't think people in a tube can restrain themselves.

The aspect that Republicans are having too many debates has a plus side and a negative. The Plus is that individual campaigns are saving a fortune they would have used on advertising. The Negative is that the audience is getting numb and bored and they are geneating a wealth of youtube comments to compose a whole campaign worth of negative advertising. And for the larger point, the debates are showing how degraded the Republican brand has become.

How bad is it? Well, now you have Donald Trump moderating a debate for NewMax on something called the ION channel. I can understand candidates going to see Warren Buffet or even the demonic Jaime Dimon but Trump. The Donald is going to host his version of the political Apprentice. Ron Paul already has protested that "Trump should not become some Republican deity." Jon Huntsman's campaign manager John Weaver laughed out loud about the debate and said his candidate will be watching with a bowl full of popcorn.

But Newt with his finger on the pulse of America said,"Who can turn down the Donald?" Cartoon meets Cartoon. What will be interesting is whether the Donald will debate economic policy with Romney and assure the audience that leveraging businesses is the way to get rich.

The state of the affairs in American politics has drawn the appropriate ridicule of Europeans. This week Der Spiegel printed a piece about the sorry array of Republican candidates and their awesome ignorance about almost anything. The "Shining City on the Hill" has become a laughingstock abroad and increasingly at home.

Steve Benen, fast becoming my favorite commentator,did a short piece in the Washington Monthly about the Right's fixation about the perception that President Obama doesn't perceive America as exceptional. Benen points out that President Obama is the only President ever to call America "exceptional" and points out he did it again at the Asian Summit but no one on the Right seems to have listened. A frequent reader of this blog wrote in that conservatives have made us all "exceptional"--"they've put us all on the short bus".

But in case you want to "learn" more about our exceptionalism, you can ever buy Newt Gingrich's recent book on the subject or Glenn Beck's holiday offering, a biography of George Washington with information you have never known before. Probably the fake information provided by David Barton about George Washington's faith.

I'm waiting for the Right to finally catch on to the fact that American exceptionalism was a term coined by Karl Marx to explain why the country had no strong socialist traditions or roots. So then we can go straight to President Obama using the term in "Marxist" ways based on Saul Alinsky's radicalism to bring socialism to American through secularism.

As Mitt Romney said yesterday, "Do you want this nation to be run by our government?" Think about that. What are the alternatives, Willard? Bain Capital? Equity Fund managers? The last time I looked our government--for better or worse--was elected by its people. That's why we call it representative democracy.