Blog Day Afternoon

So Governor Goodhair (as the late great Molly Ivins generally referred to him), who now as ever looks and swaggers like an unholy cross between GeeDubya Bush and Josh Brolin, got his little stadium prayer circle jerk going today:

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness," said Perry, praying with hands clasped.

"Father, we pray for our president, that you would impart your wisdom upon him, that you would guard his family," the governor said. "You call us to repent, Lord, and this day is our response."

It should not take a map to get these chuckleheaded mutants to see that their problems are man-made, and thus need to be undone by the men who caused them in the first place. Assuming that their sky-buddy not only exists, but exists in their specific iteration (as opposed to the thousands of other iterations now and across history), why has he not helped them out before, what with their weekly benedictions and invocations? Why does he persist in refusing to pluck the beam of greed from the eyes of people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon? Why has he ignored Gov. Goodhair's earlier beseeching to smite the drought that's been killing Texas for the past several months, yea verily and forsooth?

'Course, Li'l Ricky's got his work cut out for him when it comes to ankle-biting god-bothering schtick, namely from the one and only Mary Tyler Moron, who has been peddling her snake oil across Iowa, patiently, diligently, Sunday after Sunday:

While Bachmann's stump speech and paid ads focus almost exclusively on her economic views, the social conservatism that launched her career is a strong undercurrent.

Isn't it, though? It takes some doing to take gubmint handouts and subsidies for your fambly farm, and for your closet-case gay-curing hubby to take gubmint dough to pay for his "treatments", and still get up there and decry the vicissitudes and intrusions of the nanny state, like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

Obama really needs to step up his game if he wants another four years to coddle Wall Street and kill off what's left of the middle class, because as spineless and incompetent as he is, he at least knows when he's full of it, where these guys don't even pretend to care, and they care even less when they're called on it.

From time to time I do make small attempts to be more tolerant of the obsessively religious, to understand the important role that ritualized comfort mechanisms play in the lives of many people. But dammit, these things are right in front of them, and if they were to devote half the energy and time focusing on the actual people causing the strife in their lives as they do on their futile exercises in public piety, they might actually get somewhere.

And the reflexively pseudo-objective (in the sense that only politicojournohacks can muster with any real skill) notion that Perry's and Bachmann's respective ministrations are apolitical is ridonkulous. They are inherently, overtly political. This is early-stage dog-whistle scamboogery at its most obvious. Wait six, nine, twelve months, however long it takes for the presumptive front-runner or second-stringer by that point in time to schlep out to Saddleback and genuflect before Rick "Hey, You Gonna Finish That?" Warren, corral larger swathes of mainstream rubes.

Of the seemingly infinite ways that American politics and participants find ways to be buffoonish and annoying, this may be one of the more irritating offenses, this incessant god-bothering schtick, redolent with its tribalist assumptions that everyone is just supposed to pretend that this "approach" to problem-solving has every bit the validity of, say, a more empirically, logically based approach.

Not that empiricism and logic have all that much impact on politics in any phase anyway, of course, but at least you can more accurately keep track of who's responsible for lawn-darting the country.