November came on, and wow did it suck. There was that miserable election, for one thing—in a world where Harry Reid survives but Russ Feingold loses (and don't even get us started on his opponent) what hope for justice is there? Where is the sanity?
Some good perspective written by someone at Senator-elect Ron Johnson's victory party:
Tea Party types mistakenly believe reasonable and progressive Americans disrespect them for their anti-government rhetoric. That's untrue. Despite its use in attack ads, there is no such thing as an "anti-jobs" candidate. Everyone wants less spending, reduced deficits and decreased government control of everyday life. Russ Feingold has wanted that for 18 years and has been rewarded, by the very people who should most champion him, with unemployment, ironically putting Feingold, once again, more in touch with the average American than any other pol. So it's not that many of us don't want what the Tea Party wants; it's that we don't believe the Tea Party genuinely wants those things.
How do I know the people before me tonight are hypocrites and counterfeits? Math. So far, the Republicans have notched gains since the last election nearly across the board. With women, GOP candidates recorded six point gains. With men, eight points. White people are voting nine points higher for Republicans than they did previously. Yet, when asked how they feel about the GOP, 53 percent answer that the are "dissatisfied" with the party. Bullshit.
But more than that, I know they are phonies because they openly champion this greatest phony. [Ron Johnson] is a man who claims to worship the values of Atlas Shrugged's objectivism, with its stress on personal responsibility and freedom from government regulation of the individual. Yet he is for government restrictions against homosexuals. In his victory speech, Johnson praised his hometown of Oshkosh, yet he would not grant that very same hometown's newspaper an interview (maybe because of how the interview went with the nearby Green Bay Press Gazette). He has been named the "Tea Party" candidate. Yet, his opponent Feingold was endorsed by none other than Bob Barr. He has criticized the bank bailout even while accepting political donations from those same bailed out banks. He lambastes the stimulus and champions tax cuts even though a huge portion of the stimulus was tax cuts. He calls climate change fictive, blaming temperature changes on sun spots. He is anti-government subsidies—yet his business has directly benefited from them. They are him and he is them. And they will all abandon him in six years when he hasn't delivered these people from their disappointment and personal joylessness. A feat which, of course, nobody is capable because they are fundamentally joyless people.
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