The absurdist theatre attendant on the decision as to which of the several dozen Republican aspirants--Huckabee, Gingrich, Barbour, Daniels, Palin, Pawlenty, and the rest of the assorted grifters and gunsels who've gravitated like carrion beasts to the carcass of the GOP--will receive the nod and the nomination to "take on" O'Bama in 2012, seems to burgeon exponentially with silliness every day.
Yesterday, another electoral midget tentatively bade enter the pre-fray, as Minnesota's "minute-woman" (accent wherever you please!) Michelle Bachmann announced she was sampling the winds, deciding whether or not to decide. This could be ironic, had not "irony" been irresurrectibly slain by BOTH Kissinger AND now Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh, to be an editorial cartoonist in such times as these.
But, of course, Bachmann, and all the rest, should NOT be interpreted as "real" people. What they are is incipient "brands" defining themselves, in the tradition of the most successful (so far) political "brand" ever, "Barack Obama." In this, therefore, they are nothing more than self-drawn caricatures, artificial creations designed to attract media attention; sort of ambulatory examples of what Daniel Boorstin, in 1961, described as "pseudo-events":
But I digress.
(Via Wiki~~) "A pseudo-event is an event or activity that exists for the sole purpose of the media publicity and serves little to no other function in real life. Without the media, nothing meaningful actually occurs at the event, so pseudo-events are considered “real” only after they are viewed through news, advertisement, television or other types of media...The term was coined by the theorist and historian Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1962 book ‘’The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America’’:[1] “The celebration is held, photographs are taken, the occasion is widely reported”. The term is closely related to idea of hyperreality and thus postmodernism, although Boorstin’s coinage predates by decades the latter two ideas and the related work of postmodern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard."
Because the presidential tenure of St. Barry, the Pale, is not going to be dependent on which of the thread-bare and shop-worn, clownish postulants the GOPukes nominate but, instead, on whether he's finished--or done enough, anyway, to be held eternally responsible for--the jobs the "first African-American president" was installed to do, namely:
1) finally to undo--and take the fall for undoing-- the last vestiges of the domestic New Deal safety net, andBeing the first "minority" Boss, he won't be allowed the privilege of plausible deniability" for responsibility, the way GW Bush did after September 11.
2) globally, to become the "minority" icon on whom the blame for the (always inevitable, and just now becoming visible) "fall" of the Murkin Empire can be laid.
I'd feel sorry for St. Barry, but for the fact that I cannot believe he didn't know all this going in; and still went along.
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"Dr. Woody" is the nom du blog of John Konopak, Ph.D. (Ed/C&I, LSU, '89), MJ (LSU, '85), of Albuquerque, NM, life-long scribbler, proud DFH, and veteran of both the USAF and the counter-culture movements of the late '60s and early '70s. His surname is a cognate for 'cannabis'/hemp in the Slavic language/region (mebbe Ukraine, mebbe Russia) of its origin, and he was whelped on April 20, at 4:20 AM--to the manner born. He blogs indefatigably and almost invisibly, and is an admirer of what the rest of the world calls football.
From professing "curriculum theory" and journalism, to carpentry, car-sales, radio announcing, industrial management, and the basest of labors (even teaching high school for a couple of years), he's done a LOT of things in his 65 years--he once even wrote public relations copy for the Seattle mafia! But he claims he's never lost a job in his life: he says he knew where every last one of them suckers was the day they run him off.
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