Arliss Bunny's Blog

While you may be thinking that John “Cheeto” Boehner has nothing more to worry about these days than how he will be redecorating the Speaker’s office to get the Pelosi out of the carpet, let me to assure you, he has MUCH bigger problems. Allow me to explain. Remember earlier this week when you were at the grocery store to purchase a large cart full of wonderful produce to bring home to the bunnies in your life…or something close to that. While you were there a young human started to scream and cry. It didn’t matter the context because it is always the same thing, a single child brews up a tantrum which translates to, “I’m furious because you aren’t paying ALL of your attention to me, Me, ME!” To that child, the world revolves around them and whatever toy or treat they have fixated on at that moment. That child is ruining the shopping experience for everyone else in the store because none of those other people matter. Other people are not a part of that child’s microscopically small, warped universe. Now multiply that child by, say…the Tea Party and you have an idea of ol’ Cheet’s problem. John Boehner has been a bad parent and now he will have to live with the consequences.

I know what you are going to say, “The Tea Party is a grass-roots, populist uprising and in buying it a lollipop, Cheeto is just bowing to the will of the people.” Here’s what a little knowledge of grass (I believe I can be considered a specialist in that field.) and fact-checking* will get you.  As a, granted, self-avowed grass specialist, I know that populist grass is a mess and it isn’t funded by the Koch brothers. The Tea Party, on the other paw, has been heavily funded by major Republican think tanks, activists and donors. It was only made to look amateur by all the nutbars who came along for the ride. Watergate’s Deep Throat had it right all those years ago when he said, “follow the money.” Ol’ Cheeto and his buddies were just pushing the Tea Party around in his shopping cart thinking, “Wow! This is spectacular. TP, here, is giving all these Democrats a whopping headache,” but Cheet failed to notice, there were other people in the store too, namely, Republicans.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The Democrats are going to lose this next election precisely because they exemplify that which can be found on oh-so-many grassy lawns, a

hot mess |hät mes|
a derogatory term describing a situation, behavior, appearance, etc. that is disastrously bad. Think “faux pas” but times ten. Possible origin is literal (think, steaming dogpile).
“She got up on stage and tried to sing Beyonce’s “Dangerously In Love” but her performance was a hot mess.” – the Urban Dictionary

Cheeto’s problem with the election is that he will actually lose some seats which could well have been won by a sane Republican in the general election because the sane Republican was soundly thumped in the primary. This, of course, is a relief to Harry “Closed the Gap” Reid and Chris “Double-digit Lead” Coons but not-so-much for ol’ Cheeto.

Still, it’s really the post-election nightmare that is keeping Cheeto awake at night. (Well, that and the bright orange glow in the room.) Just this week the Republican Party published their “Pledge to America” which featured, appropriately, their version of America…a whole bunch of white people. Literally. I challenge you to find a photo in the published document that shows otherwise. Of course, they could also have called this the “Dead in the Water Pledge” because the combination of trying to add more than $4 trillion dollars to the deficit and all of the actions which will be over-ridden by a simple veto means that, frankly, NONE of the Pledge will ever see the light of day. However, it will give the Democrats terrific campaign fodder both for this election-cycle (“Everyone repeat after me,  ‘trillion’?!?”) and for the next (the “2012 Do-Nothing Congress”.) The Pledge avoids making any of the genuinely hard decisions it takes to govern a nation. It’s cowboys and red meat and a whole lot of white folks – in other words, it’s a Texas Bbq – and, people, you’ve already been there. Which, is the point the Democrats are FINALLY using to gain a little traction.

Additionally, the Tea Party and its extreme backers will be successful in pushing the Republicans farther to the right than the majority of the Republican Party wants to go. Even the neo-cons (some of which are known to still have brains because just last week a mouse with a neo-con brain was spotted in Delaware) have to know this somewhere down in the heart of their polls and focus groups. I mean, it’s all very well and good for them to allow their Tea Party offspring to be a devolved, eternally angry pile of tantrum but once you are in charge, then you have to govern and the next thing you know, the Tea Party infants will be putting a Hitler-mustache on you. Cheeto is especially worried about this because, you know, orange with a black moustache will either make him look like a die-hard, Who-Dey, Bengals fan or a year-round celebration of Halloween, neither of which will make his party more attractive to voters in 2012.

Oh – and then there’s the government shut-down being threatened by the Tea Party two-year olds and their buddies. Just recently, in an interview, the still wildly popular President Clinton was noting, with glee, how well that worked for the Republican Party in 1995. Don’t think for a minute that ol’ Cheet missed that point.

The last thing that keeps Cheeto from joyfully sucking the juices out of the marrow of the bones of the children from whom he wants to strip health care is the knowledge that moving farther to the right in order to attempt to mollify the never-to-be-satisfied Tea Party is the sure knowledge that the farther he goes the harder he makes it for rational Republican Presidential hopefuls, like Indiana’s Governor, Mitch Daniels, to get elected. The Democrats may be barely as organized as a pile of poop on a nice green lawn but, when energized, there are still more of them and the fastest way to energize the Democrats in 2012 is to live with two years of Tea Party insanity between now and then. Cheeto may seem like a delicious snack and all the rage right now but he isn’t an idiot and I promise you, being awakened several times a night by a screaming kid during the next two years isn’t going to be any fun for him or for us.

*[Note: if you are from the neo-con media or work for any of the major news outlets, all of which are owned by conservative corporations, “fact-checking” is that suspiciously foreign thing the actual liberal media has been doing for years. For further information go here.]