THOMPSON / BROWNBACK in ’08

I can only view tonight’s Republican proceedings as a stunt of epic proportions: used car salesman Tommy Thompson and man-in-the-bubble Sam Brownback are clearly performance artists dispatched by Cooper Union – class of 1929. They met in the voice-throwing class, and came to be pals, because they had a lot in common. They were character actors, first, and embarked upon a short vaudeville run together after that – they had a partner act by the name of Tommy and Sam, ran an invisible flea circus with a tiny organ grinder and for extra money, dealt a little three card monte, penny ante, on the side. The dynamic duo fell apart for a brief time during the war years, when Thompson landed a job hawking Swedish double boilers to the US military, and Brownback was, fortuitously, shipped by his handlers into a hole deep in the ground. But now the Boys Are Back, and better than ever. Running for president as a pair. Debating on television. About precious wombs. And nuclear wars. The greatest show on earth.
No. I can’t be flip about it, but it’s just so hard not to feel incredulous at these hilscarious Republican presidential candidates, several of whom have clearly never left their houses or talked to anyone who wasn’t a straight white male televangelist. Of those who are clearly in the running for the nomination – Romney can straight up bite it, and while I can get with Giuliani and McCain on one or two matters ON PRINCIPLE, even as the best (“best” = least likely to prompt my expatriation) candidates on the Republican end, they are still too scary to even fathom after the last eight nightmarish years. McCain is straight Norman Rockwell in this piece (even his most lucid moment, on immigration, was cloying and Tom Brokaw/”Greatest Generation” enough to give me the shivers) and based on this:
“McCain and Brownback both admitted they voted to authorize the U.S. military invasion of Iraq without reading the formal National Intelligence Estimate in advance.”
“I received hundreds of hours of briefings on the situation,” he clarified, while speeding through the part where he said he never read the Intelligence before voting for the Iraq War. I definitely think McCain is the right man for the job. Hopefully as president he’d just base decisions on a shrewd combination of briefings, chance/ impulse, and the flippant advice of acquaintances. In fact, it would be rad if he would just let his pastor make all of his major war-related decisions for him, so he didn’t have to over-exert his eyes.
To set down the pained sarcasm for a minute, I want to point out that everything advocated tonight was rooted in destruction, defensiveness, antagonism. There was a sense of “preserving” something. With the exception of McCain’s eloquent speech about immigration/ green-card Latinos serving in Iraq (a speech totally negated by his actual policies and alignments), and Giuliani pointing out that immigration (social diversity) is what makes America great (a true New Yorker stance), there was apparently no doubt, on that stage, of the candidates’ entitlement to preserve that thing. These are men whose sense of self is synonymous with their sense of being above, that they are living without a doubt on a holy plateau, righteously defending values (and language) and bodies and babies and, above all else, Christianity.
Huckabee’s astonishingly simplified view of immigration summed up the scary stupidity of the night : he wants the borders closed, and immigrants (Mexicans) to go through one at a time, “with a ticket,” in the same way Americans attend sporting events at a stadium. The imagery, appropriately, invokes manifest destiny. If the immigrant gets the ticket, the Americans have won.
(Has Huckabee ever been south of Colorado, by the way?)