Captain Obvious.

The Sad Clown of the Fake Middle.

With apologies to Walt Whitman…

Oh Captain, My Captain! Your dorky work is done;
Your flabby craft completely slack; a rack of tired bone;
…

Captain Obvious is doing it again.

The bad habit of prosaically jerking off the Lil’ Captain with the curtains open and the lights on, where God and everyone can see him. Creating out of ass gas and whole cloth a completely imaginary Reasonable Middle Ground inhabited exclusively my Himself, and then squeaking up on his soft and dainty hind legs, craning his neck in every direction, and angrily wondering where everyone else is.

This is a little taste transcribed out of today’s NYT from an Op-ed entitled, “Thou Shalt Not Destroy the Center.”

Keep in mind as you read this that according the Captain, the “Center” is where all the cool kids should be hanging out, but the Center – in Friedman-speak – has no defining characteristics except that it’s halfway between here and there. Like Mercator lines, the Center is an arbitrary midpoint between wherever the Right happens to be today, and wherever the Left stands.

Keep in mind that as the GOP has galloped like the Pony Express on meth in a beeline (he said, knowing full well that Hemingway would never mix bees and ponies in the same sentence) away from the Constitution and towards the very twilight rim of the world beyond which lies Theocracy, and the Left has also moved to the middle – in some ways that are quite good, and others that are ridiculous – Friedman nonetheless contends that the only stance a reasonable man should take is to measure the distance (the direction be damned), automatically divide by two, and that is where The Captain will make his stand.

Until tomorrow.

When Pat Robertson declares some fucktard fatwa against red-heads. Or Dick Cheney comes out as pro-using-puppies-to-torture-children…at which time the Captain will undoubtedly find a way to demonstrate that the Dems are somehow, some way, equally wrong on the whole red-hair and/or puppy-toddler-torture issue.

And he begins with a long, pointless quote (read "padding") with which I shall not bore you...

… And it is the yawning gap between the huge problems our country faces today - Social Security reform, health care, education, climate change, energy - and the tiny, fragile mandates that our democracy seems able to generate to address these problems that is really worrying.

Why is this happening? Clearly, the way voting districts have been gerrymandered in America, thanks to the Voting Rights Act and Tom DeLay-like political manipulations, is a big part of the problem. As a result of this gerrymandering, only a small fraction of the seats in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures are really contested anymore.

Therefore, few candidates have to build cross-party coalitions around the middle.
Most seats are now reserved for one party or the other. And when that happens, it means that in each of these districts the real election is the primary, where Democrats run against Democrats and Republicans against Republicans.

And here’s comes the money shot…

…And when that happens, it produces candidates who appeal only to their party's base - so we end up with a Congress paralyzed between the far left and far right.

Yes!

Always with the Captain the ground glass in buried deep in the taffy, but if you chew carefully, it's always there.

So let me ask, in as calm and even a tone as I can muster: What fucking “Far Left” are you talking about, you hectoring little fraud!?!

How many Communists are in the Democratic Party? How many Socialists? How many Greens? How many people that even discuss doing anything but rolling back a few tax cuts for the 10,000 wealthiest human beings in the history of the world?

…
This is a real dilemma because a vast majority of Americans are just center-left or center-right. Many surely feel disenfranchised by today's far-left, far-right Congress. Moreover, the solutions to our biggest problems - especially Social Security and health care - can be found only in compromises between the center-left and center-right. This is doubly true today, when the real solutions require Washington to take stuff away from people, not give them more.

Then he takes a parting shot at Ronald Reagan, calling him the, “…the most overrated president in U.S. history, lowered taxes and raised government spending, triggering a huge spike in the deficit. But because he did it with a sunny smile and it happened to coincide with the decline of the Soviet Union, he is remembered as a Great Man.”

No, Tom he is remembered by Republicans as a Great Man, but he’s a nice, soft, safe target isn’t he? Being dead and all? As opposed to taking on, say, a living, breathing disaster of a President who out-Reagan’s Reagan (hat-tip to Bill Shakes) by the measure of every single metric on your own Fucking Up Our Country scale.

But the Stupidcabra out of Crawford is still hale and hearty and in power, and therefore not someone a nocturnal, scampering-along-the-wainscotings kinda guy like the Captain likes to take on.

No, The Captain has done this before. Many, many times. Like awkwardly prestidigitating a quarter out of a baby’s ear, it is amusing to small children once, annoying the second time, and worthy only of hoots and well-targeted eggs and tomatoes after that.

It’s a trick. We get it. Move on.

But this Cafeteria Lady at the Wingnut Apologist Communard does not move on.

He very creepily seems not to notice that this not the second, or fifth, or tenth time he has tried to stun a waiting nation with this same oafish sleight-of-hand. This is the twentieth, or the fiftieth. He has o’er leaped unseemly and blown out his afterburners passing embarrassing years ago.

Now it’s starting to scare people.

Now, instead of manning-up and accepting the fact that everyone but the last few remaining pews in Dubya’s Republican People’s Temple are on to his ka-ka, he plunges painfully on. Dude, you have no pants, and your hair is on fire, and you need to stop with the little sermonettes about everything in the world that is wrong being Miraculously, Perfectly and Equipoisedly Balanced between an Unreasonable Left and an Unreasonable Right.

No matter what the Right does, no matter how many miles of shit you would have to wade through to find something as rancid as DeLay, as ventriloquisted as Frist, as vile as Coulter, as thuggish as Hume, or as epically Fucktacular as the Bush White House…somehow, according to Friedman, the “Left” is always Exactly as Bad in Exactly the Opposite way.

If Tom were advice-receptive, I’d sling my arm around his shoulder and say, “Pal, we see the quarter you palmed, OK? And we see that you dropped the quarter. We see that you've got nothing, so please stop picking up the baby by the ankles, shaking the hell out of it, and screaming “The IS a fucking quarter God-damn it!””

But like David Brooks (with whom he works second shift, guarding the GOP American Dream Junkyard and Auto Stamping Plant) he’s trapped in a very scary place. Because to fully acknowledge what is happing to our country, he’d have to peel his puffy eyes open, pick a side and fight for truth against powerful men. And the side which simple fact would compel him to choose would not be the one giving him such lovely and lucrative reach-arounds. He would have to bite the hand that handjobs him, and Captain Obvious don’t roll that way.

But the problems are still there, and Brooks already called “Shotgun” on the spineless-toady-galloping-off-gibbering-inanities-into-the-desert seat in the NYT-Mobile, so Captain Obvious had to come up with a different way of trying to deflect blame away from his owners.

And how about to make my point I just shamelessly quote myself from June when the Captain was yet again trying to run this same, stupid con...

…The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

This is what happens when you make that big plummet from being a fluffy Future Trends writer to being just another One Trick Phony.