Election Varia

Obama and Romney clashed again on Tuesday night, and the President, who did not suck this time around, won decisively.  Libya should have been Romney's strongest moment, but instead of mounting any number of potential valid criticisms, Romney decided to bust out the conspiracy theories and got fact-checked in real time to the applause of the audience.

The substance of the criticism seemed to be that Obama didn't take a firm-enough stand.  Believing and saying the right things, with a sufficiently puffed-up chest, has become a substitute for actually doing the right things--a sad legacy of the GOP's unholy union with conservative religion.  Stand-taking is a substitute reality--thus Paul Ryan, to show his concern for the poor, waltzed into a soup kitchen, held a clean pot under the sink for the cameras, and waltzed back out.  But hey, stand taken, right?  And never mind that the soup kitchen is now losing donors over the incident--or that the House GOP, in its headlong rush to politicize the deaths of American service personnel, has recklessly and despicably endangered the lives of America's friends in Libya.

Still, it's refreshing to see the conspiracy-theory, information-bubble denialism have real time, real world consequences.  And that's one of the reasons that I'm absolutely against any liberal equivalent of Fox News, as some have suggested.  While I normally love a guy whose Twitter profile pic is an elephant blowing itself, he's dead wrong here.  The willingness to spew prolefeed inevitably becomes the willingness to swallow it. This happened to the communists and it happened to the GOP, and don't for a moment think that it won't happen to liberals. Ignoring reality in favor of what we wish to be true, or what is expedient to electoral victory, is merely the first step down the road to that horrid, crazy place where the raving lunatics of the Tea Party mewl in the dark about baby-killing communazis and shariah-law implementing, atheist homofascists. You just can't take the One Ring and hope to do good with it--all that your sterling intentions will amount to is resisting just a wee bit longer than they did.

Speaking of mewling in the dark, Billy Graham, one of the last evangelical leaders who was not a Republican shill, recently repented of that failing via a full-page ad in the WSJ.  Worried about the future of the country, which he referred to using a phrase that was added to the pledge of allegiance when he was 35, the elder Graham firmly cemented his legacy as a civil rights opponent defender of marriage the way God intended: between one man and however many women he can afford one woman.  He also all-but-endorsed Mitt Romney, following which all references to Mormonism being a cult disappeared from his website.

And in unrelated news, the nones just hit 20%.  One wonders why.