More mush from the wimps...

Well, what else can you call it? I realize the tradition is to say Democrats are effete pansies, but yesterday's Republican "Pledge To America" is, as Alex Pareene writes at Salon, "sad"; it's a bunch of impotent sloganeering and emasculated childish rage, but with pictures.

You can read it here (PDF link) if you'd really like to. Might be worth a larf or making googly eyes at, but don't worry about getting angry and angsty over it because it's not serious enough to merit it. It is, in fact, a tourist brochure for flavor-of-the-moment Republicanism: lots of bright color pics and contentless graphs, a miscellany of blurbs and pretty much everything you already knew about when you pulled into the rest stop to take a leak plus some stuff you wouldn't have cared about if you'd known; you'll put it back in the rack between the disposable state highway maps and the pamphlet with a kayak-er getting soaked on the front and wonder if the Slim-Jims are worth seventy-five cents and if you get the Mountain Dew will the much-needed caffeine boost be worth having to pull over again to take another leak a hundred-and-fifty miles down the road? And this is the part where you've already forgotten about the, what was it, Republican Bat Caves Spelunking Whatever?

If you think I'm engaging in hyperbole, it's less than you think and you can demonstrate this by way of math: you may have heard news reports like this one describing the "Pledge To America" as a twenty-one page document, but if you clicked on the previous link to the official PDF (or picked it up off the brochures rack) you may have noticed the real deal is slightly heftier and shows a 48-page page count; counting four pages as cover (front cover, front cover inside, back cover inside, back cover), what we end up with is a 44-page handout. So what gives? Did the Republicans add lots and lots of substantive detail to the 21-page draft that popped up before the official rollout? Nah. What happened is that more than half the final product is pictures--cowboys, the Statute Of Liberty, Main Streets USA, that kind of crap--plus the Republicans had the typesetters use a really big font, wide gutters and extra-wide margins. Kind of like when you were a kid and you tried to turn your three pages of all-you-knew-about-Beowulf into a ten-page magnum opus by WRITING REALLY BIG IN THE CENTER OF THE PAGE. Except maybe the Republicans have a partial excuse insofar as they're assuming old white people get tired of wearing their bifocals all the time, I dunno.

I didn't see any photo credits, so I don't know if the authors used a whole bunch of public domain clipart or if these are photos donated by various campaigns. So many Republican candidates this year like dressing up like cowboys (hey, it worked for George W. Bush!) that it's hard to tell whether the lassoing cowboy in the sunset is from a cigarette ad or a still from some upstate New York Congressional candidate's TV promo. One suspects, however, that photos like the one of Mt. Rushmore came from somewhere, and one worries the Republicans might be, ahem, thieves, but honestly, who knows? It comes to mind partly because I consider myself a creator (writer, blogger, photographer, y'know?) and partly because a friend's significant other was recently having problems with a fanzine misappropriating his work, and also because it's always funny when a group of people who walk around going, "Ronkronkronk--private property--ronkronkronk--ownership--ronkronkronk--business" end up "borrowing" intellectual property without permission or credit, like a pop song appropriated for a campaign theme, say, or a bunch of images probably downloaded by an intern from the Internet.

I write this knowing full well that some people probably wouldn't want credit for their contributions to the padding. I love the pie chart on page 23 (page 25 by way of the PDF page counter; it actually appears in the draft version, too, on page 12) labeled "Federal Assistance Programs." Odin knows what this is supposed to be--no, actually he doesn't, and Odin All-Father knows ev-er-y-thing, that's what his missing eye and raven are all about. He doesn't know for the same reason you and I don't and can't, which is that this chart doesn't have anything to explain what the various numbers mean--millions of somethings, billions of somethings, money, hours, percentages (not unless you can have 413% of something), growth, shrinkage, Frequent-Flier-Miles earned, what?. And look at what's listed: I get that certain conservatives consider the Department Of Education and the Department Of Health And Human Services and the Department Of Housing And Urban Development to be "assistance programs," but the Department Of Defense? Homeland Security? Really? And I would've thought those small-business-pimping politicos would be alright with the assistance programs offered through the Department Of Commerce, but okay, so Commerce is on the chart so it must be evil, right? Just like the Department Of Veteran's Affairs?

This may seem like nitpicking, like I'm not critiquing the ideas the Republicans are presenting; which, you know, there actually aren't any, or at least aren't any you haven't heard before, but that's not really the issue either. The reason I'm discussing their pie charts and illustrations is that it's a central part of the Republicans' flim-flammery. Why is that pie chart there on page 23/25/12 when it doesn't show anything at all and conveys absolutely no information whatsoever? And the answer is so they can have a chart. Because charts are scientific and smart and stuff: economists and scientists use charts, and Al Gore had a bunch of them and lots of people think he's smart for a politician, and a lot of those magazines that have long words in them will break things up with a chart. "Trust us, we have charts and everything." And the saddest part is that there's more than a few poor idiots out there amidst the huddled masses who will look at that chart, and instead of saying, "Hold on--what the fuck?" they're going to say, "Boy, look at how government wastes so much on Health And Human Service, 413, that's a lot, and Department Of Defense only gets 64."

Except this example, sadly, gives our hypothetical moron too much credit. Because, you see, another problem with this chart as an infographic, above and beyond (below and beneath?) the fact it doesn't show anything, is that it uses repeated or similar colors to not show it, and to figure out that the Department Of Defense's teal color is not the Department Of Justice's teal, you have to assume (a) that the government agencies are presented in the list in clockwise order, starting with the blue Department Of Health And Human Services whose wedge begins at "12:00" and (b) that the Department Of Defense is not one of the five mystery wedges (i.e. the teal "16"), since the chart lists fifteen agencies but actually shows twenty slices of pie.

I mean, it's completely possible the Department Of Defense is 16, which is pretty embarrassing for a major governmental agency during wartime, etc. When's the last time you can remember an important, cabinet level Federal agency being a 16 while other agencies are 184 or even 12? And why, why in the name of all that is holy, are good, decent Americans putting up with a 132, 132, for crying out loud?

Seriously, though, the incompetence and dishonesty is staggering, and that's the point here. It's bullshit pure and simple. My guess is that they grabbed the chart from some government or think-take pub and didn't screengrab a chunk on an opposite page that explained the five mystery wedges, perhaps along with an explanation of what the assortment of numbers means. They grabbed this chart because they wanted a chart, but they do not actually care enough to worry about trivialities like content or accuracy, and they assume their audience is too stupid to notice or care that they don't care.

I imagine the flimflam here is supposed to disguise the paucity of content in the actual text in the same way a stage magician burns a bit of flash paper to keep the audience from noticing he just stuck the Jack Of Diamonds into his pocket. In this case it might have been a better trick if the "Pledge" was printed on flash paper and actually spontaneously combusted before you could notice how fucked-up their illustrations are, but whatever.

Here's a summary of the whole "Pledge": you've heard and seen Republican House and Senate candidates campaigning in various primaries and state races, right? And you've heard them say they want to renew the Bush-era tax cuts, repeal healthcare reform, and they're against abortions and love our troops and we need tighter border security and, oooooo! that Obama pisses them off and they hate him, etc., ad nauseum, and so forth, blah, blah, blah? Well, that. That's the whole pledge. All twenty-one or forty-four pages of it, just that, except the "long" version has more pictures and doesn't say anything about just having to take the President's word for it that he was born in America and is a Christian and that he never went on a date on a Satanic altar--wait, strike that last part, that was someone else. The "Pledge" isn't a contract and it isn't a plan, it's a bunch of standard-issue campaign fare with the usual head-scratchers and contradictions. Lower the deficit by raising less money, cut Federal programs unless they're really popular, expand personal liberty unless genitalia are involved somehow, America's a land of opportunity except for immigrants, we're going to make it an official requirement that we read legislation before we vote on it because apparently we're not already doing that, and (oh yeah!) I guess we also ought to start following the Constitution (because apparently we were doing that wrong, too, even before we became the minority party). Do not try to cut any of it with a knife or to eat it with a fork.

May the gods have mercy on us. These liars and fools could very well be elected to Congress in large numbers. I'm not sure if I should be worried that they'll then try to make an agenda of trying to pass their Pledge into law or worried that it doesn't even make for much of an agenda. They'll compare themselves to Reagan, but Reagan was (at least) an idiot with an ideology, whereas these people compose a gibbering horde armed with slogans and borrowed pictures. Should I despair?