[Vision2020] Post-Election Humor

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
November 7, 2012
Happy Days, Even With the Cliff By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

La Di Dah Di Dah ...

We have been through a lot, people. But now the presidential race is
settled. Barack Obama won. People on both sides worked heroically, and, on
Tuesday, their candidates behaved well. This should be a happy time.

*Oh, my God! There’s a fiscal cliff! We’re all going to fall over and go
bankrupt!*

Did you just hear the cheerful rule? The fiscal cliff doesn’t happen until
the end of the year when the Bush tax cuts expire and monster budget cuts
automatically kick in. Now that the election’s over, everybody will
certainly be ready to move forward and work something out.

Except possibly Gov. Rick Perry, who celebrated the president’s re-election
by demanding the repeal of Obamacare.

And then there was Donald Trump, who tweeted during the vote count: “Lets
fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is
laughing at us.” Actually Trump has no conceivable impact on anything. I
just wanted to take this opportunity to reminisce about the time he sent me
an irate, handwritten message in which he misspelled the word “too.”

But look at Representative John Boehner. On Wednesday, the House speaker
gave a speech in which he vowed to be cooperative. “Mister President, this
is your moment. We’re ready to be led,” he said.

Except for a few no-go areas, such as any tax increases on “small
business.” You may remember from previous crises that the House Republicans
oppose raising income taxes on the wealthy because it would impact
struggling small businesses such as a hedge fund manager with an
eight-figure annual income.

Boehner also raised a whole new specter of political peril: “going over
part of the fiscal cliff.” That sounded less dire, as long as we all stay
inside our dangling cars and refrain from making any moves until help
arrives.

But, by the end, it sounded as if the only cliff-avoidance Boehner was
really interested in was one that raised new revenue through “fewer
loopholes, and lower rates for all.”

We have already seen that plan. It was proposed by a man who, on Tuesday,
lost the state in which he was born, the state in which he was governor,
and the three states in which he owns houses. Thanks to a blog by Eric
Ostermeier in Smart Politics, I am able to point out that the only
candidate for president who lost his home state by a larger margin than
Mitt Romney was John Frémont in 1856. And Frémont was coming out of a
campaign in which the opposition accused him of being a cannibal.

While Boehner was explaining the importance of not going halfway over a
cliff, or raising income taxes on the rich, he looked somber, and somewhat
unhappy. This may have been because his Republican colleagues just lost the
White House and the Senate. Or perhaps, it was simply because he’s an older
white guy, and, therefore, part of the biggest loser demographic of the
election, the flip-side of the insurgent Latino vote.

On election night, people were talking about the not-young male population
as if they were a dwindling tribe of graybeards sitting around a sputtering
stove in Oklahoma. The Republican strategist John Weaver worried about
becoming “a shrinking regional party of middle-aged and older white men.”
On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly moaned that “the white establishment is now the
minority.”

O’Reilly, 63, added that the new majority was composed of people who “want
stuff.” As opposed to older white men, all of whom have signed a pledge
never to accept veteran benefits, Social Security or Medicare.

“It’s not a traditional America anymore,” O’Reilly sadly concluded.

Almost everybody thinks of the world of their youth as the traditional
world. In the future, today’s teenagers will be looking back and mournfully
declaring that traditional America was a place where folks really knew how
to Twitter. Still, it’s unseemly to identify the true America as the one
where your group ran everything.

Cheer up, white men! You seem to be doing O.K. Next year women will have 20
percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate, and we’re celebrating.

And since it looks as if we’re not getting any downtime, we’ll have to get
cracking on this latest Congressional crisis. Root for a bipartisan
solution that does not involve the White House being hijacked by a guy who
keeps babbling about going halfway over a cliff.

In the past, when these things came up, the president’s big failing was his
inability to hide his contempt for many of the people who occupy Capitol
Hill. Now it’s a new day, and he needs to be so perpetually and visibly
available that the negotiators beg to be left alone.

If all else fails, strap John Boehner to the roof of a car.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20121108/7eb8c044/attachment.html>