Current Comedy: Suffering Little Children

Back in the happier days when … Aye!) Fonzi was cool & B) fore it was “goodbye blue skies, hello gray,” the sitcom series “Happy Days” seemed seamlessly inventive and we could depend on the Cunninghams & clan to resolve each and every problem within 22 minutes thus keeping the world always seeming right, right? Simple and understandable. That is until that one episode when the whole gang went to Hawaii and Fonz jumped his surfboard over a shark. Then we all realized they weren’t simply simple, they were simply stupid. Nowadays you can’t even find that tripe in syndication on cable. It’s dead. The whole Happy horse crap has eaten itself. Like the way the GOP elephant keeps in-breeding itself into an epoch-ending mammoth extinction.

 This season as we watch the collective “conservative” character careen past contemptible and straight-aways into farcical and we once again endure these wingnuts boasting over the open pyre they’ve made of their once grand old party, it’s beginning to look a lot like it’s time to pop the cork on the whole thing and simply sing “Auld Lang Syne.” These guys won’t even make believable cartoon villains anymore, not after this one.

Tis the season to make folly as they say. Or so it seems for the GOP this yuletide. First off, there’s the whole McConnell filibustering himself business, which adds a whole Keystone Cop-ish flair to their work these days. Or the fact that it is supposed to be big news that SC Senator Jim De Mint sent in his resignation so he can go run the Heritage Foundation to collect more donations to advance conservative legislation. Or there’s that part where 25% of the GOP want their states to secede because Obama is crushing business meanwhile we’re experiencing the largest increase in corporate profits in history. But now, as outrageous as their everyday antics are, the GOP has now not only officially jumped the shark, but they audaciously twirled their mutual mustaches and tossed Tiny Tim’s crutch in the Barbie. & just in time for Christmas!

Now over the years, I have watched the GOP make some major bonehead moves, like that whole Bush thing, or the part about putting a billion dollars behind the idea that the majority of the American thinking-public would consider Romney remotely human. You guys crack me up.

But this whole Rick Santorum/Glenn Beck driven Agenda 21 fiasco the Right have been churning for the past several months has finally lead to the Republicans voting against our own handicapped public by voting down spreading the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) globally because so many GOP hate the UN that we are supposed to be afraid this treaty is secret proof the UN wants to kill our children. Of course, along with their track record on the sick, the young the poor and the elderly, I guess it makes sense.

That’s right, the treaty that establishes universal accommodations for the disabled and is modeled off of our own 1990 ADA is actually such a Republican freak-out that icky old Ricky Santorum came out of mothballs to come on stage and call for the GOP to torpedo the treaty by saying signing the treaty to enforce the ADA throughout the rest of the world would give the UN the power to euthanize US disabled kids. So keep it straight, if we are loyal Americans, we need to be OK with not caring about the lame and the weak, because if we do the bad guys will come over here and kill our kids. Thom Hartmann points out that following the successful Santorum drive for rejecting the treaty, Tricky Ricky turned right around and sent out his latest fundraising letter.

You know the most amazing irony of this whole thing is that the actual acronym for the treaty is CRPD, which equals “crippled,” right? These guys are picking the CRPD and imagine themselves heroes.  

Like with the mass shooting in Connecticut, even as parents around the country are still fearful of sending their kids back to school and kids around the county are even more tearful about going, TX GOP loudmouth Louis Gohmert is already shooting off his mouth all over the airwaves screaming that the injustice in this was that the principal hadn’t had an M-4 automatic assault weapon on hand; and FOX is shrieking that Obama’s a dictator for mentioning in his eulogy that we could do a better job of protecting our kids from gun violence. Of course, to give credit where its due, if Republicans had had their way these past few years the GOP dream of going back to the good old days that was so union-free could have come true and those kids would never have been in danger in those classrooms. Heck, by age 7 they all would have been shackled to machinery in sweatshops instead.

But you know what? America knows the GOP’s happier days weren’t yours and they certainly weren’t mine. This isn’t leadership, those guys aren’t heroes, they aren’t statesmen--they’re nothing more than bad actors. When they’ve gotten to the point of suffering the little children because their deaths interfere with the GOP’s pre-scheduled Obama-hating, it begins to look a lot like Republicans have taken leave of the census and all they are left with is cunning hams & the Klan.

Anyways, Happy Holly-Days to you & yours!

--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.