It was an election day without candidates on Tuesday, at least around here. There were a couple issues on the ballot. One was to allow carry-out booze sales on Sundays. I favor. The other was for a limited time, special use, educational purposes only county sales tax of ONE PERCENT, morons, not one pennyas it is always said. This, I oppose. These aren’t especially serious matters but examining them might shed a little light on this thing we call Politics (shudder). The Sunday Sales law brings into combat some peculiar coalitions. At odds are two groups: evangelicals and similar religious folks allied with the bar/restaurant industry against a consortium of grocery/convenience and liquor store proprietors supported by forgetful but thrifty drunks. Commercial and personal interests are aswirl. One’s closest ally today is your sternest competitor tomorrow.  The result was pretty one sided, though. It was a sweep for Sunday Beer, as it was so quaintly and expertly named. Turnout was most critical. Who will remember their civic duty, and DO it? which is a two step process, versus those who will forget which takes just one and those who do not care, which takes none. It seems the intensity was on the side of the drunks for this once. The bar trade group complained just Monday that they were not getting as much support from the ideologically dry, pious voters as they had hoped. You can be certain similar complexities infest the sales tax question which I really learned of at the polls.

Two simple issues on one simple ballot yet the answers are far from obvious and those disposed to one side or another and those against are mostly uninterested in clearing the air. Quite often the reverse. There was a horrifying book, a classic in its field called A Wilderness of Mirrors. It describes the world of Cold War spying like a house of mirrors without the linear path and limited size. Confusing reflections are a metaphor for treachery, thieving and plain old insanity. In a similar sense,  Politics, and that would include all of it, is A Wilderness of Bullshit, which is not to say that this or that particular pile might be necessary, virtuous and true but you will be closely examining an awful lot of offal trying to find those few gems. Sadly that is what Politics is, was and it seems, shall ever be.

The response; the average response, the normal response, the very predictably human response is often to look away. If you could withdraw yourself from the Wilderness of Bullshit, certainly you would. But whatever else the perpetual and worsening crises outside your window may mean, plainly they imply that you can only remove yourself from the Field of Bullshit at great personal risk as the bullshit will proliferate. Here the OWS and TEA Party do indeed intersect in generalities. Both movements say that government and business are collusive and out of control which is exactly what one might expect when those paying the bills steadfastly decline to closely scrutinize those bills or those accumulating them. Now, with skyrocketing debts and crapulent everything-else, there is a great snorting awake going on. The self-described non-political person seems nearly and quickly extinct. But things are not greatly improved. Indeed it seems that the sleepers awake at the same rate and in similar proportions on either side of any controversy. While the sides in the tug-o-war grow the knot in the middle does nothing but quiver. Somehow the tectonic groaning has reached even the most somnolent and they come to consciousness as so many Ross Perots. Why, the answer is simple. We will assemble the leading figures on these questions, put ’em in a room with mini-muffins and endless coffee until they tell us what to do. And then we shall do it. Great idea. The only problem is that this is exactly what every elected official has been doing for two hundred years. They say so, anyhow. It was genius forged at big round tables that has brought us to where we are now. Whether you think the government is too big or is beholden to malign special interests (and the TEA folk say it is both) you must admit that it is the reign of experts that has made it so.

That’s not to say the experts are always wrong, although that is a superior compass than to assume they are always right. The Simpson-Bowles Commission, a high-end talking shop set up by the President to get some deficit reductions that could be passed actually did quite a credible job. But this commish was not assembled by anyone who needed re-electing. Not one item produced from it has ever been acted upon. Now we have a NEW commish. If Simpson-Bowles was a super commission, a blue-ribbon committee what do we make of the Council of Twelve? THIS one is assembled of high-ranking Legislators, six from each party. So we are really getting serious, right? Their deadline of November 23rd looms and if they produce nothing, which is likely, or their produce is rejected by Congress in either House or by the President (which is nearly certain) then pray deeply over Thanksgiving because come Monday there will be severe cuts into defense, discretionary spending and government operations that amount to a nominal trimming of $100-odd billion a year. This will still be ineffectual because the biggest drivers of spending and debt, our entitlements of SS and Medicare/caid are almost wholly excluded. And there is the added question of whether the cuts will take place at all. The Commish, after all, has no Constitutional standing. It is just a talking shop. In other words, the whole contrivance is bullshit.

Where will the rescue come from? Not from the F Troop that “debates” on TV twice a week. The long-time frontrunner at 25% is a disaster. Governor Romney, whatever else he is, is a liberal. That is a simple fact. That fact is tskedaway, claiming he did what he had to do to get elected in Massachusetts! This is an excuse? By running openly and explicitly as a Rockefeller Republican, no modest brand, he could at least have done the nation the service of sparing us Jon Huntsman but then he would have Huntsmanesque numbers; can’t have that. Romney told us quite plainly what and who he is when he revealed on live television that he objected to his garden contractor hiring illegals because it would look bad! Hey, don’t you know I’m running for office? Could Cain have exposed himself any more fully? And what of Cain? This is our alternative to Romney? It seems clear at this point that the abuse charges against Cain are contrived, “ginned up” as James Carville might put it (but wouldn’t). However like Romney’s admission, Cain’s own words, in whatever language he speaks, indicts him as an unserious man at the least. Romney flips. Cain flops and each seem to draw all their knowledge on any topic strictly from briefing sheets. Gingrich aspires to bring medievalism to our criminal justice system; lashings and hangings for drug consumption. This seems uncontroversial, disgustingly and astoundingly but so be it. Gingrich fails on simple consistency as well. He was a Global Warmist right when that was cool. He also was for nearly every program that is now fashionably denounced. He was only ever for making them rational, perhaps repealing and replacing them with something more sound, perhaps devolving them to the states but whether the government should concern itself with some perceived social malady was not at issue. Not when the votes were counted. That was all talk. And besides which, Newt is a hun. Perry should be carried off for medical reasons, he suffered a stroke in front of the whole nation last night and should be in bed. Bachmann seems passably competent on some big issues but much of that is, like Gingrich, the result of electoral maneuvering not real principle and in any case the polling indicates she should probably cash it in. Pawlenty and Santorum were early and likely technocrats. They seem to fire on all cylinders as far as policy goes but they have cool sap where their blood should run. One has dropped out, the other should. I don’t know which is which.

Ron Paul is a tenacious attendee to these contests and he does occasionally become plausible in the polls. He is the most consistent character up there, he has been the only one saying what needs to be said for thirty-some years. But he has also been saying things that shouldn’t be said, claiming to operate on principles in the daytime while drawing the ordinary lucre of legislating in the night. His foreign policy basically does not exist, which is fine in the abstract, he collects the pseudo-pacifists and the weary warfighters under a common banner but it would be a disastrous event if the US were to substantially withdraw from the globe and from the field. It seems very unlikely that Mr Paul could gain the nomination and if not, it seems about a 50-50 shot that he will run, as he has before, as a Libertarian.

The Third Party gambit is supposed to be akin to the Third Rail. Like Anderson and Perot in the past, it seems a third party would elect the Democrat; and this is the horror that dare not be contemplated. Only it is. It always is and it always should be. Why should anyone be loyal to a political party in the same sense they are patriotically loyal to the nation? Only if that party is a vehicle for their own views of government. To what extent does the Republican Party do that for its constituents? The record is not good and the elevation of Romney by the paid staffers at the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy is a flaming middle finger to anyone, 40-some percent of the nation by polling, who considers themselves conservative or even just strongly Constitutional. The firey Mark Levin, who habitually denounces and insults third party gossip smoothly changes his gears. “I’m not talking about third party. Not now.” If not now, when?

And already the funk is gelling. Obamacare or Husseincare if you prefer, has been resuscitated. The most “conservative” sitting judge in the land; Silberman of the DC Circuit, a wizened Reagan appointment, has endorsed the individual mandate in no uncertain terms and writing for the majority. The opinion rubbishes the entire concept of limited government, sacrificing it to the vapid cliche’ that we have national problems that require national solutions. That is it, friends and foes. That is it, that is all she wrote from the Judiciary. There will be appeal, there always is, but in the meantime all the stays and delays to the implementation of the federalization of all medicine will fall. The machine will be constructed. What does the Republican juggernaut promise? If we are asking Romney, it is to repeal Obamacare and replace it. With what? Looks like Romneycare. Only a meticulously constructed ignorance could allow this absurdity. That is not to say that it will not, in the end, be allowed.

So there is no relief from the courts. No relief from a conventional election. There is only one tiny sliver  of daylight in the gloom and that comes from a minor alteration in the Republican primary rules. Any primary election or caucus held before April 1st, which is most of them, must assign their electors proportionally. Meaning Mitt will not walk away with all the votes by winning simple pluralities of 30% or whatever. It is quite possible that the Republican National Convention in August of next year will decide the candidate, something that has not happened for decades. The conventions have long been bullshit since their poor TV debut in the ’60s. Now the system promises at least to preserve something we need most vitally: Turmoil. Ossification is the great enemy right now. If an obvious Obama clone like Romney becomes the clear successor you will see a collective hunker in the land even deeper and tighter than we have now collapsing what little economic activity still flowing. You may see a bump in the investment community but that is from folks who expect to benefit even MORE under Romney than they have as cronies of Obama. So we want least what Romney wants most; a quick resolution now that he has a lead, however meager. So let’s NOT give peace a chance just for its own sake. Let the war go on even if it is only skirmishing against the Mitt Machine because if it is concluded now, under current conditions, we lose.

And if we lose, they win. They, being the Statists of whatever ilk. What would that mean? It would mean further borrowing, further spending, further government growth, further receding freedoms. Given the effects on our general economy it means more recession; negative growth, shrinkage, a contraction at least to match the late one. It means a collapse in government revenues of all sorts at whatever rates which means collapse of the entitlements; meaning the checks will bounce. In short it means an uncontrolled and sudden failure of that which we know cannot continue. Social unrest? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The only meager chance to avoid just the worst bits of all this is some deviation from the status quo; some event or some person that is so far out of our current expectations that we can scarcely imagine him, her or it. If we haven’t seen something by August we will not.

Plan accordingly.

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