GOP Debate Deflates Romney

So, I’ll throw out a couple of points, then I'll move on to the meat of things.

A) Tom Tancredo is a douche.
B) Mitt Romney is a panderer.
C) Ron Paul will never win the nomination, or the general election.
D) Holy Jumpin' Jesus Christ - "do you believe what the Bible says?"
D) Tom Tancredo is a douche.

All I got out of Romney all night was that he wants to be the Republican nominee. I say that because his performance was a performance, and that it was Hilary-esque. He seems to spew out focus group commentary and positively-polled tidbits more than he speaks his mind. Maybe I’m bowled over by the flip-flopping… who knows. I do know that I’m not going to vote for any of these clowns, with the exception of perhaps Guliani or Paul, and it has to do with their stance on marriage equality as much or more than it does with anything else. If the God to which you pray dictates inequality, then he/she/it is… well… hateful and divisive.
AND we’re back from that digression to point out that Romney took some random ass question and steered it directly into support for Iowa’s burgeoning energy sector. I dislike few things more than panderers. I want a grown up in the Oval Office—not some electoral taint-licking ass-kisser. (Somewhat redundant, I know, but ‘taint-licking’ doesn’t really slam home the ass-kissing element I wanted to get in there.)

NOTE: I’m low on coffee, so this is going to be a tad muted and slightly less witty than it otherwise would be.

CNN and Youtube are dumb for letting that twit show up with her lead-in-toys question. Who doesn’t support consumer protection? (Well, as Republicans have the schlongs of big business in their pockets, they are less inclined to than the Dems, but I don’t think either is out to choke, poison, or otherwise harm your children.) Thanks, guys. If you were worried about the mommy/wifey-not-interested-in-real-politics being bored and changing the channel then maybe you scored. If you were looking to increase my scorn for the political activity of mommy/wifey-not-interested-in-real-politics, then you really did score. I want my government to govern, not to explain minutiae to erstwhile-ignorami. (That is a real word… I did have to check though.)

Tom Tancredo, the afore-labeled douche, did make a good point with that whole buy-Chinese-and-they’ll-arm-themselves-to-the-teeth bent he went off on. Cheap shit comes from China. Americans like, and buy a lot of cheap shit. China is a rising military power. The government puts the money they get from the toys (both leaded and unleaded) into building up their military. The rate of increase of military spending is kind of scary, but we still outspend the hell out of them and we’re technologically more-than-a-tad better off than they are.

Regarding the whole employers of illegals discussion, I’ll go ahead and say that they’re all a bunch of pansies who are afraid of scaring off the Latino vote. There should be a national database (um, like one administered by the Social Security Administration perhaps) of… let’s say “Tax IDs”… and employers should have near-instant access to them. You apply for a job, you shit an ID. The ID is cross referenced with data from this fictional database and you hire or REPORT the applicant. Yes, I did say REPORT. To just say “um, you’re illegal and I can’t hire you” is kind of a bunch of bullshit.
Now Jed Bartlett told me that the ACLU is a noble organization, and almost solely for his reasons I agree. I’m a big fan of the Constitution (at present) and a huge fan of the Bill of Rights. That being said, I don’t identify with the privacy concerns raised in protest to this little ditty of an idea. I mean, if what the SSA does now is legal, then how is this any different? I know it’s not too far off from a “Papers, please” stance, but I get carded for a lot of shit. I trust those monkeys running things to safeguard my information and to not abuse it. That doesn’t always work out for me, but I have to trust them to a point (or join the revolution, and I’m not up to that at this point).
I don’t know the full breadth and depth of immigration policy and law. I do know we let people in, and we let people become citizens. I’m not going to put out my entire stance on immigration, but I will say that given that there are legal means, I have little to no patience with those who elect to employ illegal means. Simplistic: yes. The whole story: no. But I’m not going to go into that right now.

I say this mostly because I have more ridiculousness to wade through. Romney is an idiot. He’s running for the Republican nomination in America, and he chokes on whether or not he believes every word in the Bible. Clearly, his pre-debate coaches thought that the response he threw out worked. Hell, they probably polled it out and had to have been happy enough with the numbers to let him choke it out on international television. This particular moment in the debate is one of the reasons why Romney was the loser.
Guliani kind of nailed what I think a reasonable, rational person would think. Whether that plays with the Konservative Kristian Kfolks (um… bad, I know) or not remains to be seen. He’s not Jesus-enough for a lot of people, but life goes on.

Do you believe this book (bible)? Romney chokes. Guliani gets it good. Christian Conservatives should like what Huckabee had to say.

McCain and torture is still an emotional experience for me. I didn’t break down with the sniffles or succumb to outright bawling, but I’m 100% behind him on this one. I’ve never been tortured. I’ve been brainwashed a little here and there [this is the part for those who might be inclined to put their mental two cents in… okay, playtime’s over] but never tortured. In theory, I’m all about subjecting murderers, etc. to bad things to make them spill plans, confess, divulge contacts, and so on. There are problems with this. 1) Not everyone who we think is guilty is guilty. B) Coercive methodologies we employ are somewhat justifiably viewed as legitimate means to the bad guys themselves. iii) In the eyes of some people, we are the bad guys, so how can we argue with them when they do the same to ‘guilty’ soldiers and marines they capture? To me, it’s kind of a catch-22 type situation, so the math tells me that we just shouldn’t torture. That and some hard core soldier-defender-of-freedom guy thinks it’s a bad idea too.
The Panderer went off about not defining torture. There is some legitimacy to that line of argument, but he screwed up his presentation and came off as a boob. I don’t think we should publicly define what torture is, but I think it should be defined. Um, wait, I think it is. McCain said something about a field manual or something like that. If he’s cool with that little book, I am too.

Ron Paul will never be president. Too bad, in some ways. He’s making some good points, and the following is one of my favorites. Get out of Iraq, because if somebody came over here and threw down a bunch of armored vehicles, guns, and soldiers, if they set up checkpoints and their privately contracted security agencies gunned down innocents on an apparently regular basis, if the theoretical version of L. Paul Bremer came in and screwed up our government, if they set up checkpoints and curtailed the shit out of our activities, if they did all this and more, we’d probably fuck them up pretty bad. We’d have an insurgency, you know, like the one we threw down in the latter part of the 18th century. I’m all for spreading freedom and democracy, but The Idiot Boy King has really botched that one up. He’s diplomatically incompetent, and courtesy of him, Uncle Dick, and W.C. (War Criminal) Rumsfeld we’ve pretty much hosed the forceful spreading of it too. Let’s take off the training wheels and let Iraq ride their wobbly bicycle of freedom off into the sunset.

Finally, Keith Kerr. Tom 'the Douche' Tancredo definitely proved the worth of his candidacy on this one… candidacy for taking a long walk off a short bridge. This asshat said that we shouldn’t expose the largely conservatively valued military to the deviance and debauchery of homosexuality. You know, because we shouldn’t ask them to compromise their morals by having to serve with dirty gay people. I guess he’s right there, because we’ve already asked them to compromise their morals enough by telling them to kill people. Or, they’re just fukt-in-the-head homicidal maniacs so killing people isn’t a big deal, but God-help-them if they have to serve with homos.
Surprisingly, Biblical Mike came out with the most valid viewpoint of the candidates. He offered that as homosexuality is perceived by the ranks to be less and less an "unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion," that homosexuals be allowed to serve openly as to who they are. Caught me off guard with that one...
I don't know what the numbers are, but being gay is used as an out. Pacifism/religion having become increasingly hard to use to the same end, service-members looking to welch out on their contractual obligations are turning towards members of the same sex for relief.
McCain, in a demonstration of the narrow view plaguing so many in power, said that some panel of generals thought the policy was going well. Well, hum-dee-doo! A bunch of old, white men thought that a needless, discriminatory policy reinforcing their sense of morality was working! Put that one on the wires! To be fair, I'm sure that there were studies and surveys and all of that clap-trap. (Why waste a chance to eat up some tax-payer dollars, especially when you can blame it on the homos!) What was the margin between intolerance for other than heterosexuality and women? Minorities? People with crappy English? (Yes, there are more than a few in the service.) Officers? Senior enlisted? People with college-educations? Smokers? People with smelly feet? People who don't bathe as frequently as often as they should, or are able? People who snore? In-your-face Christians? I bet there was a lot less tolerance for these than for marital infidelity. Hmm. So is that how we're going to make the determination of the policy-driven course of morality in this country? Yeah, back in the fifties I'm sure that de-segregation polled well too.

All in all, there's a good candidate in the bunch, IMHO. Unfortunately, you'd have to hack and saw at individual policies, outlooks, and beliefs to get him put together. White, male, elder, heterosexual, (mostly) (publicly) Christian him. Oh well. Wait... I wonder if it's considered torture to do that?

-S.W. America