Obstructionist GOP Congress shocked—shocked!—at President’s lack of legislative accomplishment!

Ooh, it’s my favorite time of every four years again. Time to fire up the old forum and pull the righteous indignation out of mothballs. We’ve got us a Presidential horse race!

Disclaimer: I could be doing this whole piece on the corrupting influence of Citizens United, but to even go there at all would eat up the whole rest of the piece, so I’m saving it for later. Like, if I ever have any thoughts on it that haven’t been echoed by what I’ve already read or heard elsewhere.

That aside… because I am a glutton for punishment, I watch the Sunday morning political chat shows even when my candidate—in this case, one Barry “Who’s Sane?” Obama—has had a bad week.

A bad week by definition being one if-taken-out-of-context gaffe (“…the middle class is fine…”); a right-wing rube heckling him an invitation-only Rose Garden Presidential ceremony; the continuing fallout from the revelation that the President has a terrorist To-Do List; the ongoing drama of which administration insider leaked what and why in the ‘Obama is a bad-ass motherfucker’ leak case; and worst of all, being called out for blatant election-year pandering with his adoption last week of elements of the DREAM Act, over the intransigent opposition of the clown car they call Congress.

Well. I should have such a bad week. Only shoot my mouth off carelessly once, and the rest of the week people aren’t discussing whether I’m tough-as-nails enough to be President, but am perhaps too hard-ass. For a Democrat candidate, that is a lovely set of problems to have. Shit, I might treat the girls to an ice cream cone.

One talking-point—besides the economy, which is already getting boring, numbers just aren’t intrinsically interesting—all the right-wing pundits drove home again and again was Obama’s lack of legislative accomplishments. It’s like the bully who is holding the new kid’s head underwater is mocking him for drowning, as if there were no relation between his holding the child’s head underwater and the kid’s inability to breathe.

The problem is, in this scenario, the bully is the GOP and the drowning kid isn’t Obama, it’s America. It’s America that is reeling on an unemployment precipice; ex-Presidents have a tendency to land on their feet despite shit economies. Even young Richard Nixon was able to make his way in the world after being exiled from the Presidency and die with more money than he came into politics with.

To their ‘credit,’ the GOP’s three-year plan to keep Obama from getting anything accomplished has actually come largely to fruition. They even played political war games with the debt ceiling debate last year which led directly to the country’s credit rating taking its first-ever hit, and according to news reports, Tea Party and GOP factions in Congress are poised to do it again when debt negotiations fire back up this summer.

That’s the problem with electing an arsonist town fireman, well-meaning Tea Party voters. Please use your head for something other than a beer-cup holder, I beg you.

The only stuff Obama’s been able to do, he’s had to do by fiat, bypassing Congress, like last week’s partial implementation of the DREAM Act. Then when he does, the opposition and their media mouthpieces get to scream about Obama overstepping his authority and in a lot of cases, that’s not always a bad argument.

But somebody painted baby into that corner.

It’s actually a pretty crafty, if simple plan. And here I was worried the GOP had lost all its game.

Let’s look at the playbook.

First, and this really is first, cockblock every piece of legislation proceeding from or advocated by the President. If he tries to get uppity by proposing last year’s Republican programs, run to the cameras in mock outrage and disclaim the newly-socialist programs you spoke in support of from the well of the Senate only the session before. Even though there are more film sources of your lies and contradictions all the time, experience shows that your constituencies are comfortably locked into your respective narratives and are unlikely to be swayed by any inconvenient truths that pesky ‘facts’ reveal.

An additional tack I’ve seen taken is to accuse the President of not being able to even get anything through the ‘Democrat Congress’ he had for his first few months in office, before Teddy Kennedy got sick. These days, the realpolitik is, it’s not a ‘Democrat Congress’ when all you have is 51 Senators. With the new filibuster protocols in effect, you now need 60 or more Senators in your pocket to truly control the Congress, not the paltry 50 + 1 that the Constitution mandates.

Obama never had a ‘Democrat Congress,’ and somebody on the left needs to do a better job of pointing that out.

Attack the incumbent President on a moribund economy. Fair enough. You have to pass this class to even get to Politics 101, and there’s no question the economy is shit. Probably the worst in my lifetime. But here’s what I noticed, that everyone else seems to just brush off if they acknowledge it at all: The entire world has gone into the crapper financially. It’s not like everyone else in our intricately interconnected global economic family is hale and hearty and we’re pissing away dad’s inheritance on hookers and blow. From my read of the news, we’re not doing as well as some but a lot better than others.

And again, Obama’s economic plan, like everything else that would have required Congress’ participation, remains strictly a matter of speculation. Would he have done a better or worse job of fixing the economy than anyone else? We’ll never know, thanks to Congress’ successfully executed stated number one imperative: Keep any Obama legislation from passing.

If the Capitol was on fire and Obama sent the fire department and the press, most of these idiots would race back into the flames.

Obfuscate the Romney biography. Because optically, it’s a disaster. Another insensitive, C-average child of privilege from a political dynasty with Daddy Issues he hopes to resolve by occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The last thing the national (big money) GOP wants is for the electorate to draw a straight line between Romney and George W Bush, and his biography makes it almost impossible not to.

On the off-chance Obama does an end-run around Congress and actually accomplishes anything, accuse him of doing it for selfish purposes. If everything Obama does between now and the election is a political pander to the progressives (his recent surprise support of gay marriage and the DREAM Act, for instance), his legacy will be a stellar one even if Mitt Romney’s unfettered financial supporters successfully purchase the Oval Office for him in November.

Pretend your weaknesses are strengths. This is actually my favorite tactic because it’s so flat-out ridiculous. Like when Romney accuses Obama of being out of touch, which he’s taken to doing repeatedly. I know Romney supporters who laughed out loud the first time they heard him spout the line.

That is some big, hairy ones you got there, my friend.

Or the argument that “immigration is not the only issue Hispanic voters care about,” which you’d better hope is the case when you spent months criss-crossing the country during the primaries calling for a higher and higher electrified fence to keep their kind on the dirty side of the border.

Methinks the Republican talking-points generators have never met a Latino who wasn’t clearing their table or blowing their leaves. The same way they’re pretty sure they’ve never met any gay people, either, because that sort doesn’t travel in their circles.

What’s sauce for that goose isn’t sauce for this gander! Or something. I never did understand patrician noodlespeak.

When all else fails, go scandal mining. For instance, I love the new leaks scandal because it’s a high-res snapshot of the Republicans’ sorry foreign policy pickle. The GOP—who were so very casual about the outing of an active-duty undercover CIA operative in wartime back during W’s reign—are taking great pains to be seen hopping mad over the unauthorized release of documents that tend to make Obama look like a bad-ass motherfucker on the War On Terror front, which used to be their baileywick until W screwed that pooch too by failing to catch bin Laden. Oh, and invading the wrong country. Oh, and Abu Ghraib. And the deliberate campaigns of media distortion perpetrated by the highest sources in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman scandals. Oh, do stop me now…

Another friend, a big left-winger, is infuriated by the revelation that Obama has a “kill list.” A President during a time of asymmetrical war with a list of the enemies’ command and control structure to be captured or killed… where is the headline here? If FDR had a chance to whack Hitler in 1944, he wouldn’t have done it? Or Goebbels, or Hirohito?

Get over yourselves, hippies. That’s exactly the kind of thing a strong Commander-in-Chief does.

Thank God Congress does not have to approve his every action as Commander-In-Chief or by Christ we’d still be in Iraq, Osama bin Laden would be still be spanking the monkey in his luxury self-imposed exile in Pakistan, our participation in the Afghanistan War would be ramping up instead of winding down…

If you want an idea of what’s wrong with Washington, look at the only things that are getting accomplished. If Obama can’t do them on his own, they just don’t happen.

So you tell me, how the hell is that Obama’s fault? That bastard has alienated his base so much he might lose re-election by kowtowing and capitulating to a Lucy Van Pelt Congress, which is constantly yanking the ball away at the last second, no matter how much of the game he gives away in a foredoomed attempt to reach bipartisan consensus.

What’s scariest is that the partisan divide is no longer limited to the Executive and Legislative branches of government. Now even the Supreme Court is caught in a hopeless party-line gridlock with the result being that one man, Justice Anthony Kennedy, decides all the most important cases in the land. One man, not nine.

Surely, this cannot be what the Founders intended.

It used to be, when a huge case was decided, like Brown v Board of Education or Loving v Virginia, or the NIRA decision of 1935 striking down part of FDR’s hallowed New Deal as unconstitutional, it came down unanimous. The Justices put their political persuasions aside and came together for the good of the country. The same way the founding fathers did, when they crafted the Declaration of Independence. They could have pushed it through with a majority-rules vote, but due to the weight of the matters in their hands, they decided it was well and proper that a unanimous vote be required. And again, legislators of conscience put aside their partisan roles, compromised, and America roared to life.

But now we have a Supreme Court whose every decision is decided along strict, reliably predictable party lines, even monumental ones like Bush v Gore. It’s disgraceful and despicable and either says something terminal about our democracy, or—God willing—are a set of opinions just waiting for a more temperate court to reverse.

Like the ObamaCare opinion due this month. If it’s not 5/4 one way or the other, with Kennedy being the deciding vote, I’ll eat my hat. Every single major opinion, a strict party-line affair coming down to one man’s vote, now that Sandra Day O’Connor has retired, anyhow. Wasn’t she the swing Justice who in the end decided Bush v Gore?

One Supreme Court Justice, one vote. Not exactly our democracy’s greatest accomplishment.

And the next President will have the usual opportunity to pack the Court to his liking, which is the long game to political hopheads like me.

So, mostly Christian, self-proclaimed God-fearin’ Americans, I ask you: whose hand do you want at the helm during these scary social and economic times so many of you knuckleheads believe is The End Days? A guy who has already put his career on the line fighting to give health care to everyone, promote social equity and reduce persecution of the downtrodden; or a guy whose major platform promise consists of cutting aid to the poor and helpless while he lines the pockets of his corporate contributors with unprecedented tax rates so low financial experts are doing spit-takes?

Tell me again how any Christian of faith can possibly vote for the temple money-changer instead of the guy outside with all the unemployed friends, ministering to the needy?

Obama is a St Francis of Assisi, bad-ass ninja motherfucker who can not only carry a tune, but look good doing it. That is a marketable product you don’t need a legislative portfolio to sell.

That is a fucking movie of the week and sweaty internet fan fiction, not a record to run from, or one his opponents ought to be able to exploit.

So don’t count Barry out yet. I predict he’ll be right back after this commercial with his most shocking exploits yet!