The International Writers Magazine: US Politics. The New York Perspective

Feeding Frenzy • Dean Borok The big dolphins of the Democratic administration are circling round-and-round the ever-shrinking mass of Republican sardines, compacting them into a hard core of bait and swimming through to devour it at their leisure. That’s how I see it, a mindless mass of frantic morsels darting hither and fro, hiding in the safety of numbers, a visceral calculation of the desperate, leading each little fish to hope that his neighbor will be devoured, and not he.

The Republicans have devolved from a well-oiled stealing machine to arrive at its present status of another devotional cult of fanatical weirdoes, Waco-style, complete with its armory of machine guns and messianic ravings.

The King of the Sea is the whale Obama, a fat man trapped in a thin man’s body, like an Eddie Murphy movie, a voracious denizen of the deep whose favorite food is – Republicans. He is peeling them off from the mass and eating them one-by-one: Hagel, Colin Powell, Christopher Christie (no minnow himself!).

But Obama is getting help from inside the Republicans who, being fish in the sea, don’t have a cliff to jump off of as lemmings do. But the self-destructive fury of their nature is driving them to eat each other, even as the big fish are eating them from the outside. Boehner fits neatly into Cantor’s mouth, who is himself mindful of being swallowed up by the Tea Party.

Who will survive this feeding frenzy? Most likely the spicy Republican sardines, the newly-elected Hispanic American senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas. Being Hispanic and Spanish-speaking, they could conceivably bring in support from right-wing Hispanic elements, of which there are more than a few.

Both of these senators’ families immigrated to the US from Cuba before Castro’s revolution, but both portray themselves as being inheritors of the anti-Castro exodus, which is totally phony and shows you what kind of bottom-feeding Republicans are prepared to engage in to supply their base with its requisite ration of venom.

This is going to be a jagged pill to swallow for a party that has built its whole outreach program on a foundation of white supremacy and bigotry, but it’s the only life preserver for the Republicans to hang on to if they wish to eventually return to big-time looting of the economy.

Ordinarily, I would say that Rubio and Cruz are too young to be an immediate threat to the Democrats, who have a deep bench of reserve talent bursting with ambition for 2012, but the Republican power centers may well find their cupboard so bare that these two guys might be propelled to the top by virtue of being the only fish in the Republican sea that have the buoyancy to float. Being white Cubans, they might have the crossover appeal to attract Hispanic voters while still retaining white cracker support.

As for Obama, his current trajectory is propelling him to the status of a stellar constellation in the astral firmament of legendary American leadership. Taking office so soon after the Republican-induced collapse of the economy, he was able to immediately get a handle on the situation instead of having to come in years after the fact, when the rot had been permitted to settle into a decrepit base like Roosevelt was forced to deal with. (Imagine what the world would be like right now if McCain had prevailed in 2008!)

Back in the Roman Empire, a majority vote in the Senate was sufficient to get you elected as a god, entitled to a marble temple and devotional following. I don’t believe that modern sensibility would permit Osama such an honor, although contemporary people are no worldlier than the Romans were. Nevertheless, he is sure to get a huge freaking monument for getting a grip on the situation so early and guiding the ship of state through treacherous shoals. He accomplished healthcare, banking reform, Bin Laden, the economy, and he is attacking on all fronts. By my way of counting, he has surpassed Clinton.

Hopefully, he won’t have to surpass Roosevelt, who had to defeat not only the Depression, but also World War II. Granted, Obama painlessly extracted us from two useless wars provoked by the previous idiot (who, if he had been astute and tightened airport security after receiving intelligence warnings, might have intercepted the gang of 9/11 hijackers, armed only with carpet knives, and saved the whole world a decade of grief), but that is nowhere equivalent to holding national unity together through a murderous depression and then going on to defeat World Axis Fascism. Let’s prey Obama never needs to rise to that level of heroism.

© Dean Borok 19. 01.13
deanyorkave@yahoo.com

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