The Republican Debate – NOT a synchro

Monday night, we watched the Republican debate. I don’t recommend this  torture to any political progressive. But we felt it was time to really listen to these four candidates to find out who is the craziest.

The candidates, as they stood on the stage, from left to right:  Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul.  The debate was in Tampa, Florida, so there was a lot of talk about immigration, the housing meltdown, and unemployment. The verdict?

We liked most of what Ron Paul said about foreign policy issues. He sounded reasonable. Brian Williams asked what each candidate would do if Castro died and half a million Cubans descended on South Florida. Ron Paul said that the sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Cuba for the last 50 years serve no purpose, that there’s no cold war going on. We trade with Russian, with China, so why not with Cuba? The imposed sanctions have only empowered Castro and impoverished the Cuban people. He’s against war – all of them, any of them.    And we agreed with him on the role of the Federal Reserve  and what caused the financial meltdown in 2008. But on social issues, forget it.

Mitt Romney is rather pathetic. The guy will be 65 years old in March, has been running for president for about twenty years, says he wants to be CEO of the country. That last part really tells you all you need to know about Mitt. He would run the U.S. like a business – maybe like Staples or Sports Authority, two companies he started while working as a vulture capitalist. Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, he’s the  consummate flip-flopper on everything. He’s the guy who, after the family dog pooped in the back seat of the car during a family vacation, put the dog in a roof carrier. Yes, you read that correctly. A roof carrier.  What’s that tell you about him? Even worse, Mitt is a vulture capitalist, you know, one of those guys who sweeps in, takes over  companies, fires a bunch of people, takes tons of $ out of the company, declares bankruptcy, and walks. His ideas about running the country like a business is exactly what George W Bush tried to do. And look where that put us –  in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Mitt’s response about Castro’s death? He’ll go to “another land” when he dies.

Then there’s Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania. A family values sort of guy.  He’s the young looking guy in the sweater vest, whose mouth dimples when he smiles. Now let me tell you, those dimples are cute. But they aren’t presidential. And neither is the fact that when his wife miscarried one of her children, she and Santorum took the miscarried fetus (20 weeks) home, so the other children could meet her. What do you say to a miscarriage?  How do you develop any warm and fuzzy relationship with a miscarriage? I frankly couldn’t hear much of what he was saying; my inner political bitch was shrieking and pulling out her hair. But I did catch a few gems: war and more war, especially a war with Iran and let the free market regulate itself (sure, didn’t that work great under Bush?)

Then there’s Newt, the former speaker of the house, a good-ole boy in American politics who touts family values even though he’s on wife number 3 (a Barbie doll with a helmet hairdo), who allegedly asked wife 2 for a divorce when she was undergoing chemo for  breast cancer. With one of his wives – hard to keep track – he asked for an open marriage, the wife said forget it.  Whatever, the guy is 68, left his position as speaker of the house when his fellow Repugs voted him out for ethics’ violations. But he claims he’s got those family values down pat now, that he has seen the light since he married wife 3 and became a Catholic. She’s the blonde who apparently had a six-year affair with Newt before he ditched wife 2. She usually stands next to or behind him, the one with the very strange helmet hairdo that looks as though it’s pasted into place with tons of hairspray and goo. She’s wide-eyed (contacts?) and those eyes are always on Newt. She’s undoubtedly entertaining visions of being first lady.

Of the four men, Newt is the most disturbing. He’s more intelligent than Bush, thinks and speaks well on his feet, is boisterous and self-confident enough to convince some people that he should be prez. This guy worked as a lobbyist for Freddy Mac – but claims he wasn’t a lobbyist, that he was an historian. Huh? An historian is paid 25 grand a month to the tune of more than a million bucks?

And he’s leading in the polls. For me, Newt as prez would result in a country, a world, that would be like something out of a science fiction movie – Soylent Green, maybe, or Minority Report or, frankly, any of the books that Philip K. Dick wrote.  No, I take that back. If any of these candidates become prez, the American people are screwed and the world enters a new, heightened phase of chaos, war, greater disparity between rich and poor.

Obama may not be perfect, he’s not the true progressive many of us thought he was. We were snowed by his rhetoric. I wish he weren’t so prone to “bipartisan votes,” I wish he hadn’t bragged about killing Bin Laden, I wish he would cancel all wars, close Gitmo, cancel the Patriot Act that Bush implemented. I wish he weren’t so willing to compromise. I wish, I wish. But the bottom line is that Obama still gets my vote in 2012. He might prove to be the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. He’ll have his chance to tell us about what will be coming in a second term when he gives his state of the union speech.    It’ll be a relief to hear something other than all the right-wing babble coming out of these debates and primaries.