“Making of Legislative Sausage Is Never Pretty”

That was one of Frank Rich’s sentences in his Sunday morning New York Times Op-Ed column today (“Is Obama Punking Us?”) and it needs to be remembered. How come everyone (and the most flagrantly-forgetting offenders are the news media)...how come EVERYONE forgets that THE MAKING OF LEGISLATIVE SAUSAGE IS NEVER PRETTY? How come everyone conveniently forgets that all legislators trade horses...including Presidents of these United States and oh my! DO THEY EVER!!! Rich’s column was about how President Obama is facing REALITY. The reality being that the world is looking at the promises Barack Obama made as a Presidential candidate as opposed to the actuality of Barack Obama as President. What is striking me at this moment is the bullshit parading in so-called news stories as “What Americans Value”. I am reminded of my hometown, Paxton, Illinois. All those staunch male Republicans who ran that small town in the 1940’s and 1950’s valued the high price of corn, the belief that women needed to obey men, the belief that teen-age girls didn’t know (as in, the Biblical understanding of “know”) about sex and if they did, they were whores and that the boys who knew about sex were normal young men who should be applauded. The truth of the matter was that boys and girls were having sex and enjoying it; some were getting embroiled in the reality of sex leading to pregnancy, shotgun weddings were happening all over the lot, women were making the best of a bad situation, bad laws and a male-dominated understanding of religion, and the price of corn was very important. And, all during the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, as now, we kept hearing that Americans value honesty, purity, and God. Which, of course, always was, is now, and no doubt will be into the foreseeable future a HUGE CROCK OF CRAP! Yes, Barack Obama is trading horses. He has to. He has to, because this is the way our government and our society are set up. Were we a country that valued honesty in all things, it probably wouldn’t be necessary for a President to trade horses and engage in the making of stinky legislative sausage. But given that this country values an untrue and impossible-to-live-up-to image of itself, we are stuck with WHAT IS as opposed to WHAT-WE-WISH-WERE-TRUE. And, I am not ranting about what results from all this BULLSHIT. What results actually works out fairly well. And it usually is not a bad deal for the majority of people in this land. What I am ranting against is the pain that is inflicted on all of us by the hypocrites and assholes who demand that we live up to a cheesy, sham, deceptive, fake, deceitful ideal that the political charlatans selling all this phony purity, honesty and love of God can’t live up to themselves. So...what else did Frank Rich say today? His last paragraph is quotable: “The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.”