POOR MR. BOEHNER

POOR MR. BOEHNER

John Boehner is near tears, not because he's worried about his reelection as his seat was bought and paid for years ago and is locked up in his safe. What he is fretting about is being Speaker again. If he found it a thankless job last time, woe to the fellow who bangs the gavel in 2013. Little doubt it'll be a Republican as current projections give them 237 seats to the Dem's 195. What scares him is that the GOP caucus will follow Nancy Reagan's advice again and “Just Say No!”

With Democrats in control in the Senate and Obama back in the White House, it's that “deja vu all over again” thing all over again. But with the Tea Party's tea having grown cold and the 2014 mid-terms just around the corner, Boehner knows two more years of obstruction will cost them the House and give the Democrats two years to pave Hillary's way back home to 1600 Pen. Ave.

What John's trying to figure out is how Republicans can cooperate with Obama without looking like wusses. If he's half smart he will hit on the slogan, ”Country First!” And maybe he can talk one of the Tea Party mouthpieces into shouting, “No representation without taxation!” (Fat chance!) But there is another way his caucus can keep the evil Grover Norquist from having a stroke: Don't vote.

Can you hear him announcing the vote to raise taxes of billionaires? “Ayes, one ninety eight, Nays, two. Not voting, two thirty five.”

There is another thought that keeps popping up in Mr. B's head at night. Let Eric Cantor get his hand on the gavel he's long dreamed of, and then he and fifty or sixty other Republicans can go back to their old jobs as plumbers, roofers, and pimps (i.e lobbyists) come the mid-term election and old Johnny B can keep his seat.

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WHAT I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Under the Christmas tree in the White House there is a gift box from the Republican National Committee, but there's nothing in it. The gift won't come for weeks, maybe not until Super Tuesday, or the GOP convention. But eventually Obama will opening it to find who the GOP nominee is, and what he finds will be just what he asked Santa for. Meanwhile, back at the campaign headquarters in Chicago, the staff is packing goodies into three boxes. One is labeled Romney, one Gingrich, and one just has a black “? “

These days the polls are looking good for Obama in 2012. In them, he's ahead of Romney or even with him, he easily tops all the others, and the campaign hasn't started. And there is the possibility that multi-billionarie New York Mayor Bloomberg will toss his fedora in the race as a third parry canaidate, which would be a fatal blow to the GOP.. But none of this has stopped the professional whiners from attacking Obama for not giving them what they wanted in their Christmas' stockings.

The latest of these prompted me to cancel my subscription to Harper's magazine. The publisher of that once-responsible magazine, John MacArthur, recently wrote that Obama should not be reelected because he has “lost his moral authority.” It strikes me that anyone who says that has lost his, and his common sense too. Obama got bin Laden, ended Bush's Iraq war, got his health care bill passed, has cut taxes on the poor and middle class, killed “Don't Ask,Don't Tell,” and has restored true “family values” to the White House.

But the MacArthurs of the country, few as there are, will have zero affect on the 2012 vote. Before November of next year it will be Obama versus one man, and whoever that is his campaign is ready to launch block buster campaigns against him. (And it will be a Him now that Backmann has turned to dust.) There will be a southern campaign that reminds Evangelicals of Governor Romney's support of gay marriage and a woman's right to choose; a mid-west campaign that focuses on Romney's record as a jobs killer when he ran Bain, a company that is still paying him; and an east and west coast campaign that focuses on the recently “born again” Tea Party reactionary. All of those Romenys will loose and a truly moral man, who has read the Constitution, will be reelected.

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FAST FORWARD?

Less than a month to the 2016 election and it's all over but the vote counting. Of course it already was the day the Democrats wound up their convention in Phoenix The nomination of Hilary Clinton and Julian Castro cinched the election and the GOP seemed almost to accept the fact. Their once vaunted SuperPacs were now called SuckerPacs, and they had a devil of a time finding

any suckers. By mid-September all the polls agreed that the Clinton-Castro ticket had won and the Republican party was in debt for more than a million dollars. .

When the history of the 2016 election is written, the account of President Obama's speech nominating Hilary Clinton may well be the lead paragraph, and the video of President Bill Clinton's tears will be remembered by everyone who saw it. But those histories will quickly move from the Democrat's victory to analysis of the final days of the Republican party.

Political junkie Leland Nichols (who voted for Harry Truman in 1948!) has written that the death kneel of the Republican party was sounded when they adopted what was then called “the southern strategy.” He argues that had they taken a hard look at the nation's demographics they would have taken Horace Greely's advice and gone west, “A party that depended on southern white Evangelical men was bound to starve to death,” he's written. “As the number of Hispanics and non-believers exploded, the fate of the GOP was sealed.”

What Nichols and other junkies now fear is that the currently unified Democratic party will again split as it did in the George McGovern era. As fears of terrorism subside and the economy maintains its up swing, the zealots on the far left will rise up again and split the party. However it seem clear that that will not happen during the Clinton-Castro years. Nichols ended his blog post by saying he was glad he wouldn't be around for the 2024 election.