Dance of the Reptiles (40 page)

A 14-year-old girl who gets pressured into having sex with her boyfriend must have the baby. Same goes for a wife forced by threat to have sex with a violent husband. Same
goes for any woman with a medical condition that makes pregnancy dangerous.

Meet your new Republican Party, hijacked by reactionaries.

Poor Mitt Romney. To placate the Bug-eyed Right, he has flip-flopped on so many issues that he’s got ideological whiplash. He even put Ryan on the ticket to fire up the Tea Party and religious conservatives who are wary of his moderate past and also of his Mormonism.

And what did Mitt get for all his trouble? Ten weeks before the election, the national debate has been diverted away from the sputtering economy to the emotional subject of women’s rights and free choice.

Romney’s mission at the convention is daunting. He must make a speech that shows he’s different from the Akins and Ryans while at the same time sucking up to the rabid factions whose votes he will need in November.

And this pivotal appearance will occur after four days in Tampa, of all places, where the rains of Isaac could chase the party faithful and morally upright into lurid dens of cheap champagne and pole dancers.

Sin and Facebook fame are only six feet away.

October 27, 2012

Not an Easy Makeover for Allen West

After less than two years in Congress, Rep. Allen West has raised $15 million to get himself reelected.

That’s a mountain of money, but you’d need every dime if your job was to make West look like a calm, responsible person. His wack-job ranting hasn’t hurt him among the Tea Party faithful, but it threatens the prospects of the 51-year-old Republican since he switched to a new district that
includes Martin and St. Lucie counties and part of Palm Beach.

The task for West’s campaign managers is daunting because he has said so many phenomenally offensive and factually indefensible things. Every time the man opens his mouth there’s a moment of high drama: Please, Al, just stick to the script. We’re begging you.

Back in July, appearing as he does with hungry regularity on FOX News, West likened Social Security disability benefits to “a form of modern, 21st-century slavery.” In one coldhearted breath, the retired army colonel managed to insult 828,000 fellow veterans under the age of 66 who report receiving disability funds from Social Security. These include both active-duty and retired military.

West’s lame effort to mop up his mess occurred the following night (again on FOX) and featured his now standard attack on the liberal media for twisting his words. The recurring migraine for West’s handlers is that his words don’t require any twisting. They just spill out of his head that way, usually in front of a television camera, allowing them to be painfully replayed over and over.

It’s been a gold mine for West’s young Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy, whose most effective campaign ads are a running montage of West’s indelible sound bites. A favorite is his 2011 speech to a conservative women’s group in which he declared that those who support Planned Parenthood “have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.” What in the world was West babbling about? Are there mandatory spay clinics for guys?

Who knows what he meant, but it was weirdly fascinating to watch.

He actually went on—and some of this you don’t see in the commercial—to urge his audience “to let them know that
we are not going to have our men become subservient … because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow … deficits will continue to grow.”

Oh, now it all makes perfect sense.

Is West insane? That’s a natural question, but the answer is no. He’s just a fringe gasbag who spices his macho act with a little right-wing paranoia.

Still, it’s possible he really believes that American men are being psychologically emasculated by evil birth-control advocates and that this is somehow responsible for the nation’s budget deficit. Likewise, it’s possible West was dead serious when he told a Jensen Beach town hall meeting last April: “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

This was a stupendously dumb remark in a community where many are old enough to remember Sen. Joe McCarthy. (Among the current House members whose patriotism West attacked is a Lutheran farmer from Maine, that well-known hotbed of sedition.)

You can see the problem facing West’s campaign team, and you can see why it needs at least $15 million. This is not an easy makeover. What do you do with a guy who blogs that voters with Obama bumper stickers are “a threat to the gene pool”? There are many Obama stickers to be seen in the 18th District along Florida’s Treasure Coast, a fact lost on the arrogant West, though not on his pollsters.

Unsurprisingly, most of his money is coming from outside the state. He’s raised about five times more than Murphy, thanks partly to big checks from the PACs of ExxonMobil, Northrup Grumman, Citizens United, and OSI Restaurant Partners, which owns Outback and Carrabba’s. Floridians who buy their groceries at Publix might be interested to learn
that the company’s executives apparently have no problem with West’s wild slurs. So far Publix has sent him $12,500, through individuals and PACs.

The question is, will all that be enough?

Can $15 million create in the minds of voters a new, unembarrassing Allen West?

If not, he’ll know who to blame: Planned Parenthood, the secret Communists in Congress, and all those slaves getting disability checks.

September 29, 2012

Billionaire Koch Brothers Try to Buy State’s Court

The new stealth campaign against three Florida Supreme Court justices is being backed by those meddling right-wing billionaires from Wichita, Charles and David Koch.

They couldn’t care less about Florida, but they love to throw their money around.

Last week they uncorked the first of a series of commercials from their political action committee, Americans for Prosperity. The targets are Justices R. Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente, and Peggy Quince. They were three of the five-vote majority that, in 2010, knocked down a half-baked amendment slapped together by state lawmakers seeking to nullify the federal Affordable Health Care Act.

The Florida Supreme Court upheld lower-court decisions in finding that the proposed amendment contained “misleading and ambiguous language,” the hallmark of practically everything produced by this Legislature. Stoned chimpanzees have a keener grasp of constitutional law.

Conservative groups have gone after local justices before. In Iowa, a place that has nothing but vowels in common with
Florida, three state justices were fired by voters after being vilified for ruling against a ban on gay marriage.

On the November ballot, Lewis, Pariente, and Quince are up for merit retention, meaning voters can choose to retain them or not. This simple system was put in place to keep the state’s high court above the sleaze of political races. The mission of the Kochs, hiding as always behind their super PAC, is to get the three justices dumped at the polls so that Gov. Rick Scott can appoint replacements.

This is worth repeating: If the Kochs have their way, Rick Scott—yes, that Rick Scott—gets to pack the Supreme Court with his own handpicked crew.

“Yikes” is right.

The head of the Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity is a person named Slade O’Brien, whose job is to keep a straight face while saying things like: “We’re not advocating for the election or defeat of any of the justices. What we’re attempting to do is call more attention to them advocating from the bench.” Meanwhile, the state GOP’s executive board is less coy. It voted to oppose the retention of Quince, Lewis, and Pariente, branding them “too extreme.”

Well, let’s have a peek at these dangerous radicals.

Justice Pariente, 63, has been on the court for 15 years. She graduated from George Washington University Law School and clerked in Fort Lauderdale under U.S. District Judge Norm Roettger, Jr., who was no softie.

Justice Lewis, 64, who graduated cum laude from the University of Miami Law School, has been on the court almost 14 years. Both he and Pariente were appointed by Gov. Lawton Chiles, not exactly a wild-eyed liberal.

Justice Quince, also 64, is the first African-American woman on the Supreme Court. A graduate of the Columbus
School of Law at Catholic University, she worked for years prosecuting death-penalty cases in the state attorney general’s office. In 1999, she was jointly selected for the high court by Chiles and that wacky left-winger Jeb Bush.

Twice before, Floridians have voted to keep these justices, but now the Kochs from Wichita say they know better. You won’t see David or Charlie in any of the campaign commercials, because they don’t like people to know they’re prying.

Their multinational fortune comes from oil refineries, fertilizers, cattle, commodities, chemicals, and paper mills. Next time you reach for Angel Soft toilet paper, think of the Koch brothers.

Both are MIT grads, philanthropists, unabashedly ultraconservative, and anti-Obama. They’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat the president and lesser officeholders all over the country who won’t bend to their will. Some Florida Republicans—respected judges and lawyers—are disturbed by the sneak attack on the Supreme Court, which they view as a bald attempt to politicize the judiciary.

The two other justices who voted against the inept Obamacare amendment were similarly singled out two years ago, when they were up for merit retention. Tea Party groups bought TV time blasting justices Jorge Labarga and James Perry, and urging voters to remove them from the court. It didn’t work.

Labarga was retained with about 59 percent of the vote, Perry with 61 percent. Those aren’t bad margins, considering that the justices can’t campaign in their own defense.

This time is different, because Americans for Prosperity has a bottomless war chest to use against Lewis, Pariente, and Quince. Be assured that Gov. Scott is rooting for the Kochs. He’d love to have three openings to fill on the court. The last thing these guys want is fair judges who know the law; they
want partisan judges who’ll obediently support their political agenda.

It’s worse than just trying to buy an election. It’s trying to hijack Florida’s justice system at the highest levels.

And all the Angel Soft in the world won’t wipe away the stink.

Note: By lopsided majorities, Florida voters returned Justices Pariente, Lewis, and Quince to the state Supreme Court
.

February 16, 2013

Rubio and the GOP’s Thirst for Leadership

Secret Valentine’s Day memo to Sen. Marco Rubio from the Strategy Office of the Republican National Committee
.

Dear Marco,

One simple word sums up your unorthodox rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address: Genius.

Pausing in the midst of a speech that nobody would otherwise remember, lunging off-camera for a bottle of water, and then slurping it like a demented hummingbird … 
Time
magazine was right. You are the savior of the Republican Party.

Was the whole country laughing at you? Possibly. Okay, yeah. But was it the most unpresidential thing you could have done? No! You could have walked out with your fly unzipped (whoa, don’t get any ideas!).

Truth be told, all of us here at the RNC started freaking out when we saw you stop and take that sip. What’s that goofball doing? we wondered. Does he think it’s a rehearsal? Doesn’t he know he’s on live TV in front of, like, 50 million voters?

But once we stopped throwing our coffee cups and kicking our garbage cans, we calmed down and thought about
what you’d done. And we finally got it, Marco—the sheer brilliance. The water grab wasn’t really a spontaneous and awkward moment, was it? You’d planned the whole darn thing, right down to your deer-in-the-headlights stare at the camera.

Of course you did, because that’s what saviors do. They see the big picture.

The script we gave you to read the other night was incredibly lame. In fact, it was basically Mitt Romney’s stump speech for the last three years. Didn’t work for him, and let’s face it, it wasn’t going to work for you, either.

Truth is, we don’t have any new ideas in the Republican Party. Our plan was to retread all our stale old ideas through a sharp, young Hispanic dude—you!—and hope people would think they’re hearing something fresh.

Obviously, you read through the script ahead of time and realized it was a turkey. So you improvised a visual distraction, something so ditzy that all of America would instantly stop paying attention to what you were saying.

In retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened to our party. Thanks to you, Marco, nobody’s talking about that moldy little speech. They’re talking about you jonesing for that water bottle. The video clip has gone totally viral. On YouTube, you’re getting more hits than that adorable piano-playing hamster!

Here at RNC headquarters, we’re receiving thousands of e-mails and tweets, including some from GOP donors who haven’t yet grasped the subtle cleverness of your “message.” Which is: Yes, Sen. Rubio is really thirsty. The whole country is really thirsty!

Thirsty for a new direction, a new vision for the future.

We’re still ironing out some wrinkles, but you get the idea. You’ve struck gold, Marco, and we’re on it.

THE JOKE STATE