(CNN) – Sarah Palin may not have the biggest fan in former first lady Barbara Bush.We’re not sure where the Tea Party movement fits into the landscape, and we hope Sarah Palin stays in Alaska.“I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful,” Barbara Bush said. “And she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there.”
Bush, along with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, spoke to CNN’s Larry King in an interview set to air Monday.
President Bush discussed the Tea Party movement, and although he said “some of the ideas make a lot of sense,” he said he isn’t sure how the new movement will fit into the larger political landscape.
It looks like the country club wants to put the Tea Party back in its pen, and what better way to begin the process than by cutting off its standard-bearer at the knees? Now, responsible citizens everywhere should rejoice at the Tea Party being marginalized. The sooner these dangerous morons are made irrelevant the better. And it’s a pure delight to see that insufferable, narcissistic, soul-draining, attention-sucking vampire Sarah Palin get smacked down a bit, even if the person doing the smacking is equally unappetizing and unwholesome, albeit in different ways. But once the sweet taste of schadenfreude disappears, we’re left with a rancid, nay, poisonous flavor in our mouths.
Ma Bush’s comment can only herald the approach of yet another American tragedy. Its outlines, I’m afraid, will become more and more distinct in the coming year, like the shape of a monster slowly rising from a swamp: President Jeb Bush.
You know it has to happen. It’s one of those bleakly inevitable facts of life, like tooth decay, old age, and death. We know it’s in our future and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to about it. If the last decade of American politics has taught us anything, it’s that there is nothing so stupid, so disastrous, or so bat-shit crazy that the electorate can’t be duped into voting for it. Given that context, another Bush in the White House doesn’t seem so far-fetched. At any rate, it looks a hell of a lot like Ma and Pa Bush are trying to pull the weeds out of Jeb’s path to the presidency, which they no doubt regard as his unalienable birthright. The first one that has to go is Palin.
The next one who will have to be removed is Mitt Romney. Right now he’s the only other viable candidate for the Republican nomination. But he might not be too hard to handle. He’s a bit of a lightweight and he follows a goofball religion that many Evangelical Christians regard as heresy. Many of them would never vote for him.
Consider this. As a Mormon, Mitt Romney believes that Joseph Smith was visited in the 1820s by an angel named Maroni, who thereupon gave him a set of gold plates with holy scriptures engraved on them. Conveniently, this new and improved word of God was written in a language known only to Joseph Smith called “reformed Egyptian.” Even more conveniently, the gold plates were never seen by any other human being except Joseph Smith himself. Funny how that works.
Why not just believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Their existence is just as plausible as a plate bearing angel — fluent in reformed Egyptian, mind you — named Maroni. Karl Rove would have a field day with this. Drop a leak here, conduct a push poll there, sprinkle a few dark insinuations around the media. With the proper manipulation, he could have every Evangelical from Lynchburg, Viginia, to Orange County, California, howling that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist. Forget that some of them already say this about Obama. Since when do religious zealots care about logic or consistency?
Mitt might have a fortune and the right kind of hair, but his kooky religious beliefs place him just a shade too far outside the mainstream. I’d bet money the Bush family secretly views him as not the right kind of person.
That leaves Jeb. He’ll have the full support of the Republican Establishment, including Rupert Murdoch’s evil media empire, and a bottomless trough of corporate money. The trial balloons are already floating. You don’t need to understand reformed Egyptian to interpret the signs.
But don’t worry. We’ll have Barack Obama fighting in our corner.
2 comments:
... we'll have Obama fighting in our corner. Yep. He might even flog them with a limp noodle. The one that serves as his spine when he's not using it to say limp things about Republicans.
- Badtux the WASF Penguin
I would have preferred Romney over the other GOP candidates that season. But I voted Democrat - for Barak Obama that election and would have, even if Romney had run all the way - even though I'm an active Mormon.
That said, the sooner the Democratic party can find room to be respectful of religious belief, the better.
The strangeness of a story is not a valid argument against it. Any student of history knows that truth is stranger than fiction. Weird stuff happens - but that weirdness doesn't make it false.
And the comparison to Santa Claus is just juvenile and ridiculous.
Santa Claus doesn't have a powerful narrative sufficient for people to devote their lives to it. He didn't inspire the Sistine Chapel, Paradise Lost, Handel's Messiah, the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the abolitionist movement, Martin Luther King Jr., or any powerful human movement of note.
Neither did a belief in fairies drive thousands of people into the unknown and unpopulated central intermountain west. No one ever sold their home and marched on foot thousands of miles risking sickness, starvation, and exposure for the tooth fairy.
It's a ridiculous comparison.
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