Money! Bombs! Jesus!
Filed under: 2008 elections, General News, Lead Story, Republicans, United States — Michael Reynolds on January 24, 2008 @ 1:32 am CET
In his first post for PoliGazette, Michael Reynolds explains why he considers this the best. election. ever. It’s the Money! vs. the Bomb! vs. the Jesus! wings!
Best. Election. Ever.
So much conflict. So many thrills and spills. So many surprises. It’s almost too much. So many questions. But tonight’s question is this: which of the GOP candidates is more dangerous to . . . the GOP?
The Republican party is an awkward bird with three wings: the Money! Bombs! and Jesus! wings. (I first advanced this theory — okay, not exactly a theory, more a re-labeling of conventional wisdom — at my own blog here.) For a long time the GOP held together because Money! and Bombs! got along pretty well, and both agreed to use the Jesus! wing as pawns.
Money! and Bombs! secretly laughed at Jesus! (the wing, not the deity,) and only pretended to care about its looney agenda. “Ah hah hah,” Money! would laugh, “What kind of a cretin obsesses over creationism when there’s money to be made?” And Bombs!, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, would say, “If you tell ‘em you love fetuses they’ll write you a check and ring a thousand doorbells! How’s that for evolution?”
Recently, however, the Jesus! wing has gotten it into its head to run its own candidate. This is wreaking untold havoc in the GOP. A clubby two-way contest is one thing. A wide-open dog fight is a whole other matter.
Still, with the recent retirement of Fred Thompson — yes, it did seem like he quit some time ago — each of the three wings had its candidate going into Florida. Mitt the Flip had pulled off one more triple gainer to emerge tada! as the Money! candidate. John McCain was, inevitably the Bombs! candidate by virtue of having been right about the conduct of the war. (Some call them neo-cons, but not all Bombs! Republicans are neo-cons. It’s not easy to claim membership in the neo-con club: there’s quite a lot of required reading.) And of course Huckabee has taken charge of the Jesus! wing. In fact there’s every reason to believe that he’s actually running for the presidency of the Southern Baptist convention and not the presidency of the United States.
Each faction has its guy. Romney, McCain and in the role of the jester, the Huckabuffoon. Excuse me, I mean of course, Governor-Pastor Huckabee.
But, wait, we’re forgetting someone: Hizzoner. Giuliani is trying to fuse the Money! and Bombs! wings. Unfortunately for him, also he’s trying to replace the Jesus! wing with an all-new concept: the Democrat! wing of the GOP. He’s pro-choice, pro-gay, pro gun control and pro-mistress. Money! Bombs! Liberals! You can see where that might be a problem for a three-winged party that’s already wandering around the sky like a drunken duck.
Now, the Democratic candidates, (The Borg Queen, Smooth McCool and Angry Nancy) are no prize pigs, but their fight is between them, it doesn’t seem to reach down to the actual voters. Most Democrats can live with either Hillary or Obama. Democrats don’t seem to really quite hate any of their guys. But almost all Republicans seem to actively hate at least one of their four candidates. Money! Republicans hate Huckabee and McCain. Bombs! Republicans hate Huckabee. Jesus! Republicans hate McCain, Giuliani and probably Romney. Each of the wings hates at least one of the other wings. Sometimes two. And Giuliani, bless his heart, actually offers GOP voters the chance to combine their hatred of opposing wings of their own party, with hatred of the Democrats.
So here are the 64 dollar (or 19 Euros,) questions: how does the big red bird fly best? Which wing can it afford to lose in November? Can Mitt the Flip get votes from the Lucifer’s brother wing of the GOP? Can Rudy “Who’s Guarding My Mistress” Giuliani get the votes of Republicans who understand that he’s actually a Democrat? Can John McCain overcome the GOP’s aversion to actual as opposed to pretend heroes, and win the votes of people who don’t quite remember why they hate him, but hate him all the more for it? And should anyone dumb enough to vote for Huckabee be allowed to dress themselves?
Stay tuned. it’s the best show around. At least until the writers settle their strike.
1 C Stanley
January 24, 2008 @ 1:40 am CETLMAO! Funniest and probably most accurate election analysis I’ve seen yet.
2 Tap
January 24, 2008 @ 1:53 am CETOkay, I’m sorry (for who? me, probably) but that WAS funny!
3 James Stanhope
January 24, 2008 @ 3:25 am CETThe Money! wing does not "hate" McCain, despite the provisions of McCain-Feingold, because that legislation can be renegotiated.
The Money! wing does hate Huckabee, despite his completely unworkable proposal of a national sales tax to replace the income tax (which proposal is the Money! wing’s dream). The Money! wing understands that Huckabee’s supposed populism is completely bogus. They hate Huckabee because he’s this year’s clone of George W. Bush, and the Money! wing wants no more of that, tax cuts or not. Huckabee probably does believe that, in a certain sense, the White House really should be the political wing of his own religious sect, and the Money! wing has finally learned to exclude that anyone who really does believe that.
Two other points: First, the Jesus! wing of the GOP serves not only to recruit political foot soldiers, but a very specific kind of foot soldier: White Southern middle-class women, and conservative-religious white Protestant/Catholic women in the rest of the country. The GOP’s current antipathy to abortion does not appeal to American women generally, but it resonates enormously with the previously-named two classes. It is a complete mystery why these two classes of women don’t understand that they’re being used and discarded, but apparently they don’t. The Jesus! wing of the GOP has gigantic appeal to a certain kind of white Southern middle-class woman (I live in Georgia). They apparently love the idea of the Federal government supporting "family values" even though the Money! and Bombs! wings have no interest in that except nominally, as you observed.
My second point is that, in both the South and the rest of the country, there is apparently a lot of economic resentment out there that motivates white working-class men and women to support either Huckabee or John Edwards. This was brought home to me in a recent online New York Times piece about my hometown of Chillicothe, Ohio, that is borne out by my experience in Georgia. These voters apparently don’t think through the fact that no one can govern as the kind of populist that Huckabee and Edwards present themselves as. But they’ll find out.
4 James Stanhope
January 24, 2008 @ 3:34 am CETCorrection to my above post, 2nd paragraph, final sentence: "… exclude THAT anyone who …" should read "exclude anyone who."
5 Tap
January 24, 2008 @ 3:41 am CETI would wonder why you didn’t talk about the Victim! wing of the Dem party, except that it would exclude noone, as it makes up the entire party. It’s a giant competition to try to be the top Victim! de jour, but at least they have the unity to acknowledge that they are all victims at heart.
6 Money » Money! Bombs! Jesus!
January 24, 2008 @ 4:32 am CET[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]
7 ASC
January 24, 2008 @ 5:48 am CETThe Democrats wish they only had three wings. Of course, having recently sliced off their Bombs! wing (which was more like a "Bombs From a Safe Distance and No Bodies on TV!" wing) they are becoming a bit more aerodynamic. Still, there’s just too many competing sects to make for a pithy yet perceptive post. I mean, John Edwards alone embodies the "Lawsuits!" "Handouts!" and "Protectionism!" wings — and that doesn’t include the tail feathers.
8 Dyre42
January 24, 2008 @ 7:42 am CETMichael. How is that you, Amba, and I keep ending up posting on the same group blogs together?
9 Claudia
January 24, 2008 @ 11:40 am CETHehehe, Money, Bombs and Jesus, that’s hilarious. Great post, looks about right too.
I’d wonder about the Money! wing of the party though. Some are certainly fiscal conservatives, but there are others, especially the ones who are poor and laid off, for whom making Wall St. healthy doesn’t appeal as much. Huckasaints populist message might resonate with them, even if they aren’t as much into the "Constitution to Gods standard" part.
Romney strikes me a bit like the Republican’s Clinton, he says the right thing, but you can’t bring yourself to trust a single word that comes out of his mouth. McCain at least seems to believe what he’s saying (so does Huckabee, unfortunately, the things he says are terrifying). He also has bonafide national security credentials, real ones, not "I put on an orange vest and shoot a hamster" Disney credentials.
The Jesus! wing might abandon entirely if anyone BUT Huckabee gets the nod. Huckabee is not getting the nod (unless the GOP is now suicidal) so you have to look to a candidate that will be able to pull a considerable number of Independents. McCain strikes me as more able to do this than Romney.
10 kreiz
January 24, 2008 @ 3:14 pm CETDrye42 @8- thought the same thing myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
When I first saw this post’s caption, I thought "van der Guillen’s stealing from Reynolds". Then I saw that Reynolds had been invited onboard- which caused an immediate reassessment of MvdG’s judgment.
Reynolds, Moran, Amba, Dyre. Holy crap. It’s the Takeover of the Boomers. I thought the 24 year old Wunderkind was doing just fine. :)
11 Michael van der Galien
January 24, 2008 @ 4:12 pm CETKreiz: stop drinking
Name: van der Galien.
And: wonderkid, or wunderkid, not wunderkind.
Yes, my judgment isn’t that good, but I’m willing to cut them some slack / give them a 3rd / 4th / 5th chance
12 Tully
January 24, 2008 @ 4:42 pm CETBetter check them dictionaries before chiding, Michael. You lost all the sting with the followthrough.
13 wj
January 24, 2008 @ 6:14 pm CETMichael just assumes that anybody here is probably writing in English, or with maybe the occasional Dutch word.
But the English language is almost as accepting of immigrants at the United States. (Comes of starting life as a merger of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, I suspect.) Which means that words like "wunderkind" have wandered in and been embraced. Along with a lot of others - from most of the languages on the planet.
14 kreiz
January 24, 2008 @ 6:33 pm CETGalien… sorry, M. :) You’d think I’d know by now!
As for ‘wunderkind’, I looked it up before posting. Figured I was dancing on your turf with that one!
Still- no one has explained the sudden AGING of PoliGazette?? It’s most troubling…. especially for an aging Boomer like me who comes here to see what young people think! Reynolds may be young at heart- but he’s challenging McCain in the geezerhood department. (Don’t tell him I said that.)
15 Michael van der Galien
January 24, 2008 @ 6:46 pm CETwunderkind isn’t Dutch. We write Wonderkind.
It is troubling I agree. What can I say? Claudia is 27 though. So she’s keeping it young!
16 amba
January 25, 2008 @ 6:30 am CETAw, ageism. Here I thought you guys were above and beyond all that, along with the sexism and racism.
I suppose it is too many of us all at once (I didn’t really know Dyre and Moran were baby boomers). If we didn’t post our pictures or reveal our age, would anybody know? Isn’t there something unconditioned about an online mind? The whole point of being out here is not being weighed down by one’s particulars. When you read Reynolds, does his age have any affect on your laughter?
FWIW, my single largest cohort of kindred souls online has been guys under 30. It just happened. We just got along. It’s been a kind of surprise consolation for the son I don’t have.
. . . Michael van der G, are those supposed to be chicken wings? They look horribly like deep-fried human embryos.
17 amba
January 25, 2008 @ 7:02 am CETThe Dutch would definitely go to some trouble not to spell anything the German way.