Republican Primary Tavern Ammo For Progressives

#7 Of 8 – The Three Quitters

By Lance Hendrickson
Contributing Writer

We thinking people have lots of very good reasons to hoch rhetorical loogies at every right-wing fist-shaker we might encounter at the country club or the dollar store (those being the natural habitats of the two classes of the Stingybigot phylum—the Screwallbutus, and the Hateallbutwhite, respectively). But for all their faults, the cons do tend to share one attribute that merits a little respect (albeit after a few cocktails): by and large, they are some stubborn sonsabitches. They just don’t give up on anything, facts be damned.

F’rinstance, you could roll up to any megachurch in Orange County on a given Sunday, pack a Greyhound full of Reaganites, highball it straight to Ekalaka, Montana, and rub all their noses in freshly-dug Tyrannosaurus thighs stacked like cordwood along the roadside. But they will never, ever stop believing that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs are just a hoax perpetrated by pointy-headed lib-ruls bent on using gubmint schools to turn their kids gay. (Then again, I dunno if you could do that outside Bob Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove –  he gave up paying the bills, and it’s, uh, bankrupt.)

You could smack them in their bifocals with any federal revenue report from 1982 forward, and they will never, ever lose faith in the aptly-named Laffer curve. They just know, in their bones, that the less tax money IRS wrings out of Richard Mellon Scaife or the Koch brothers, the more gas money our soldiers will have, to go dig up the WMDs that Hussein must’ve stashed someplace in Iraq. They will never give up their fanny packs, they will not acknowledge the existence of Venus (much less the impact greenhouse gases have had on the temperature of Venus), and the Stars n’ Bars will always flap in the breeze behind non-ironic lawn jockeys for miles around Appomattox, Virginia.

Clearly, except when it comes to counting votes in Florida or enforcing the Environmental Protection Act, the Klanpublicans are not, and don’t like, quitters.  And that aspect of their DNA, naturally, is exactly what we’re going to use to scoop up a few more of their primary votes for Michele Bachmann (R-Stepford). At the tavern, here’s how to educate Ralph Redneck about The Three Quitters:

Let’s start with the man who, years ago, gave up looking for hats big enough to fit on that gigantic melon of his: Newton Leroy Gingrich. Not only is he a (gasp!) known dinosaur enthusiast, he’s a guy who stopped “forsaking all others” for his first wife … and, uh, for his second wife, too. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the Pope’s big hats, but in ’09 Newton turned in his Southern Baptist membership card (or his Amway i.d., or whatever they have) for a set of Rosary beads. And lest anybody forgets, he bailed out of Congress right after he was re-elected in ’98, probably because he’d been fined 300 grand for ending his observance of the House’s ethics rules.

Now, Ralph Redneck won’t care that Newt’s bud on Fixed News, Sarah Barracuda, refudiated much of the English language a while back – heck, that’s probably what Ralphy liked best about Dubya, and neither of ‘em can spell “inimical” any better than Sarah did in those old e-mails. And Ralph might not mind that she didn’t finish being Governor of Alaska; after all, once the RNC coughed up about half of Newt’s record-setting fine amount to buy her new underpants n’ such at Neiman’s, she couldn’t spend her days sashaying between the snowbanks way up in Juneau, now, could she? Nope. In fact, to keep showing off those fancy duds nationwide to folks like Ralph, Mama Grizzly even started her own bus tour, scheduled for everydamnedplace (besides Ekalaka, Montana) … buuuut, then, she quit that halfway through, too. Sorry, Ralph –  no peek at Palin’s pumps for you.

As for Jon “Whozzat?” Huntsman … it’s cake, man. Simply remind Ralphy that Huntsman effectively waved the white hankie on behalf of John McCain’s campaign when he nominated Palin for VP. And he doubled up in ’09, when he resigned as Utah’s Governor and, effectively, ceased being a self-respecting Ratpublican, to go be Obama’s Ambassador to China (wherefrom he split after about 18 months).

Clearly, the Three Quitters have made it easy for the cons to give it up for Bachmann. We just need to head for the bar, find Ralph Redneck fishing in the pickled-egg jar, and drop him a few hints.

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