Playing Out The Dismal String

If the Democrat majorities were shrinking at the rate of a seat a day, and all their polling metrics were contracting with them at an equivalent rate, how could they even suspect that anything was happening?

Speaker Pelosi's face sat before the viewing screen in her Capitol Hill office as silent and motionless as a stone image, thanks to her most recent Botox injections.  In the guest chair to her left, Chris Van Hollen droned on distraughtly about "approaching disaster" and the need for "fundraising triage" and "cutting our losses" in order to "protect our core majority".  Which would make Henry Waxman gleefully happy, she knew.

"Yes, yes, my pretty, do what you have to do, just make sure there are at least 218 Democrats in this chamber next January.  And don't spill any water on me on your way out."

Van Hollen, who used to be profoundly relieved to leave the Speaker's presence with his sanity intact, no longer had any sanity to worry about, even if he had retained enough of his marbles to be aware of its absence.  Which was just the way she liked it.  As the old saying went, Nancy Pelosi was crazy like the one-eyed man is blind; but in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is still king.

Besides, she knew something that her loopy lieutenants did not: the Tea Party had finally snapped, showed its true scary, mobesque colors, and had ignited the long-anticipated civil war in the GOP that would tear the opposition party to shreds and dissipate the killer electoral wave that had been building for a year and a half.

She grinned and touched a toggle on her desk.  "Steny."

Her Majority Leader appeared as if by magic.  "Madame Speaker?"

"Any new speeches from Sarah Palin?"

"None, Madame Speaker, or I would have informed you instantly.  Nor has the Tea Party rampage through Delaware been contained, and it is spilling out everywhere, washing away one Pachyderm after another."

"I can see that much.  In extremity, Republican politicians launch write-in campaigns to save their careers.  I see no chance of that gambit ever succeeding.  However, neither do I want it to fail before we've had the chance to exploit the split GOP vote and flip more of THEIR seats.  See to it that we quietly subsidize it through election day."

"We are already at the limits of our campaign resources even before the operation you suggest, Madame Speaker."

"I don't care - because I'd rather have MORE than 218 seats.  Like, say, 318 seats.  Get it done, Steny!"

Hoyer saluted and vanished.  Pelosi continued watching the screen.  Nothing could save the Republicans this time; they were moving straight into a Tea Party trap - they could in fact do nothing else - which would crack the party like a wingnut.  She hoped that she would be the one to make the actual electoral kill, but it seemed probable that the President would claim that privilege, and the credit along with it.  Not only was that inevitable - rank and deity have their privileges - but Pelosi  knew that Barack Obama also cherished personal desires to rid America of the GOP, and had savagely ample reason to.

Well, that was not of final importance.  What counted was not who obliterated the Republican Party, but the fact of the obliteration itself.  And that end would soon be accomplished....

But what Pelosi did not know was that it had taken her a year simply to call Steny Hoyer; that the Sun had made an entire rotation around the core of the Milky Way during their conversation; and that since then, it had gone around three and a third times more.  For the Pelosi Poliburo and all within it, time was slowing down on an asymptotic curve; and for Speaker Pelosi, the 2010 midterm campaign would never end....and Pelosi would never know it.

~  ~  ~

You almost feel like this clip should be prefaced by one of those, "WARNING: Businesspeople are professionals who actually know what markets are and how the economy works.  Liberals: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!" disclaimers:

Yeah, she's been watching "markets" since she was a teenager.  Like a bengal tiger watches a grazing zebra.  If the CNBCCCP interviewer had asked her for her definition of "markets," she'd have come back with, "Oh, that's where I send the household staff when I start running low on brie and caviar."

But, hey, let's cut the crazy old bag some slack - it ain't easy to maintain such an ionospheric level of out-of-touchedness and become a flaming racist overnight at the very same time:

Three staffers working for embattled Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA35) were asked by security officers to leave an event in downtown Washington on Thursday after they tried to display large campaign signs just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA8) was about to speak.

...

“Let’s fight for Maxine Waters,” read a headline on the signs above a large picture of the congresswoman. Smaller headings read: “No improper action. No benefit. No failure to disclose. No one influenced. No case!”

...

“It ain’t about Nancy. It’s about black people,” Waters said.

...

Waters said she was deploying campaign signs at events throughout the country to defend herself against charges that she improperly intervened to help a failing bank secure a meeting with Treasury officials even though her husband had owned stock in the company and previously served on its board. “These signs will show up wherever large numbers of African Americans gather,” Waters said. 

Must....resist....watering hole....joke.....

Actually, it is about Nancy, in the sense that no matter how the ethics trial of the corruption firm of Rangel, Waters, Johnson, Bishop & Norton play out, they're all still going to be in the House Donk caucus until they croak because of their racistly gerrymandered districts, and so will Crazy Nancy, who relinquish her leadership position feetfirst, so she's going to have to figure out a way to live with them.

But it is immensely amusing to watch San Fran Nan get targeted by CBC protestors like she was P.W. Botha or something, demanding that she let Mad Maxine and Good Time Charlie and the bread & circuses express roll on forever, tax-free, law-free, accountablity-free, and sanity-free.  Which is, of course, right in Granny's wheelhouse.

I betcha markets don't look so "fascinating" to her now that, for an afternoon at least, she was treated like a (shudder) businesswoman.

~  ~  ~

The Pelosi Politburo was in session when the American people arrived.  There were tens of millions of them, but they appeared in the campaign warroom deep beneath the Capitol in their most terrifying form - a like number of cast ballots.  That they were led by Sarah Palin is an assumption, based on merely human logic.

The weasely faces of the Politburo were even paler in the actinic glare emitted by voter anger.  When one of them spoke, her voice echoed through the warroom with an eerily familiar last frontier twang.

"You have broken the Constitution, and been the direct cause of much poverty, misery, and corruption," she said.  "In addition, you have committed repeated slanders against me, which only the action of the American people stopped short of physical violence."

"Untrue," the President said coldly.  His voice was shaky, but he seemed otherwise to be in command of himself - no mean feat under theses circumstances.  He IS god, you know.  "Our agenda of Hope and Change is what the people want, what they voted for.  And it will work, as long as we stay the course, and you all do as you're told, and stop meddling further in our progressive affairs."

"Your so-called good intentions do not alter the facts," the voice of the American people said.  "You understood only ill the nature of your own agenda, and its effects upon us hardly at all.  Four years under your rule - and it's clear that you never intended to give up power, no matter what the voters said - would have destroyed this country utterly.  Such carelessness compounds your crimes, rather than mitigating them."

"We defy you," the President said.

"Tell us something we DON'T know.  But it will avail you nothing.  However, we are not vindictive; our justice is not based on vengeance.  We simply observe that you cannot be trusted to voluntarily observe limits on your power.  We therefore reduce your House caucus by one hundred seats, and your Senate caucus by ten seats."

The warroom burst into a roar of protest and rage, but Sarah Palin's voice soared above it easily.

"And in 2012, we're coming for your job as well."

Beside the President, TOTUS exploded.

"After a biennium back in your playpen," she said, "you may emerge as fit to be part of a constitutional federal republic based once more and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I say may.  It is entirely up to you.

"But I really kinda doubt it.

"And so, farewell, Democrats - and the 'permanent Democrat realignment.'"