Short Tales From Election Day Bizarro World by Will Pitt

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.truthout.org/short-tales-from-bizarro-world-part-cdxx59679

To be fair, the Big News people, who have spent the last year massaging the idea that the Tea Party movement is a real thing worthy of attention, got one part right: the Tea Party is for real. Not really, not in any larger national sense, but they are certainly a force within the Republican Party now, and boy, oh boy, it is going to get wildly entertaining from here. While the Tea Party itself is largely a creation of Big Media's desire to apply "balance" where none actually exists, like it or not, their focus on this ridiculous phenomenon has borne some bitter fruit for the GOP. Rachel Sladja of Talking Points Memo reported it thusly:
In Kentucky, the national Republican Party backed the wrong candidate in not one but two primaries. The Democrats managed to hold on to Rep. John Murtha's old seat in Pennsylvania. And while Sen. Arlen Specter is no longer a Republican, his defeat by Rep. Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary means the GOP nominee will face, perhaps, a much stronger opponent than the beleaguered Specter would have been.

It's difficult to argue with this perspective. In Florida, Nevada and, now, Kentucky, the far-right, base-crazy monster that was cooked up in national GOP test tubes over the last 20 years has finally crashed out of the laboratory and gone slobbering and snarling down their electoral Main Street. The GOP does not win statewide or national elections without the combination of their social-voter Taliban-Christians and their tax-cutting, rich-people wing coming together to pull the right-side handle. For a time, this was a match made in heaven for the Republicans, but now the GOP base is out of its cage and not following the program, and all of a sudden, a lot of Republican electoral eggs are getting scrambled. If the base deserts the party for a bunch of candidates who can't hope to compete against well-funded Democrats in general elections, well, that's the ballgame for them.

But then, there's the other side of the coin, i.e., The Stupid, in this instance represented by Charles Babington of The Associated Press. The following lines were actually printed by the AP on Wednesday:
Voters rejected one of President Barack Obama's hand-picked candidates and forced another into a runoff, the latest sign that his political capital is slipping beneath a wave of anti-establishment anger.

There's a moral in this nonsense somewhere, and here's what I think it is: ignore everyone. Maybe TPM is right, and Tuesday was a debacle for the GOP. Maybe the AP is right, and this last vote somehow translates into disaster for Obama and the Democrats. The reality, however, is that all these races were local and inter-party, subject to a wide swath of circumstances that don't translate into any sort of national Rorschach blot to be read for the edification of the masses. I mean, really. Rand Paul won by running against Mitch McConnell, who wasn't even running for anything.

There are five months to go before the midterms go down for real, and a million things could happen to change the dynamic. What happened on Tuesday was interesting and entertaining and utterly devoid of context, thanks in no small part to the machinations of Big Media.

[Demoiselle]

1. Exactly! Thanks for this.

[Ken Burch]

2. There's no possible good reason for Will Pitt to be banned.

Will Pitt is the conscience of DU, and articles like this show it. The banning MUST be revoked.

[Demeter]

3. Counting On Your Opponents' Weaknesses Is Only Good If there Are Any

because your own weaknesses are going to destroy you!