11/09/2011

Election Lesson: Republicans Learn That Americans Aren't Quite as Crazy as They Are:
Let's put this in perspective. For the last year, Republicans have been walking around with big hard-ons, sticking them in everyone's face, saying, "Yeah, aren't you so impressed with how big my cock is?" For a good chunk of the year, the media and the public and, indeed, many Democrats have been responding, "Yes, yes, that's a really huge erection you've got there, Cantor." And some of them have added, "Can we get some work done now?" To which the tumescent Republicans have said, "No. We can't get any work done at all until you talk more about how big my cock is with this raging boner." Which would lead to more talk about, oh, gee, just how enormous a hard-on it is. So instead of actually accomplishing anything. all everyone does is sit around and talk about Republican dicks.

Yesterday, voters across the country smacked those erections and said, "Get those fucking things out of our faces."

In Ohio, Republican Governor John "Bill O'Reilly's Ball Washer" Kasich got cock-punched by over 60% of voters, who didn't just overturn the Senate's anti-collective bargaining bill that "sought to end binding arbitration to settle contracts with safety forces [and] ban strikes for other public workers." No, instead Kasich got his ass handed to him on a platter because he went right for the wallets of the middle and working classes. And they stopped the mugging.

In Mississippi (no, really, fuckin' Mississippi), nearly 60% of voters said, "You know, we like birth control and IVF and, shhh, abortion" by rejecting zygote rights, or the "Personhood Amendment," which would have meant that every miscarriage was unintentional manslaughter (actually, that's not an absurd interpretation of this idiotic, woman-hating proposal). Lieutenant Gov. Phil Bryant had said that if the amendment failed, "Satan wins," so it looks like a large chunk of the state went down to the crossroads.

In Maine, over 60% of voters overturned a Republican law that ended same-day voter registration. Why? Because it was just an obvious, bullshit way to disenfranchise Democrats, even more so than voter i.d. bills.

In Arizona, the Republican Senate president, Russell Pearce, who is not the unholy Aussie spawn of Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, has lost a recall election to a less nutzoid Republican (who is even more humorously named "Jerry Lewis"). Pearce is the dude who made Arizona into the laughingstock of the world by authoring vicious anti-immigrant legislation (although Alabama didn't exactly get the joke). How significant is this? "Pearce becomes the first sitting Senate president in the nation and the first Arizona legislator ever to lose a recall election. He would be required to step down immediately."

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let's not cheer jubilantly that the year of Republican overreach has completely been turned on its head. Ohio also approved a non-binding amendment opting out of President Obama's health care reform law. And in Mississippi, that guy who said that shit about Satan winning? Yeah, he's governor now. And Mississippians approved a voter i.d. law.

The lesson here is not that the nation is turning against Republicans, per se, but it is saying, "Whoa, we're not that crazy and cruel." The real lesson is that the Tea Party is dead. The only hard-on it's got left is the one that rigor mortis causes. It's sinking into the ocean like so many boxes of fine Earl Grey. The only thing Republicans need to figure out is if they are tied so tightly to the corpse that it drags them down into the drink, too.