Funny how this works (a partisan screed)

I think I've figured this out. Aliens. I don't mean the kind of aliens or non-aliens this post is ultimately about, I mean the space kind of aliens, tentacley critters the color of fresh boogers with as many eyeballs as you can count, the kind of aliens whose idea of a trip round the block for drive-thru is to hop on their silver flying saucers, zoom over here from Alpha Centauri and grab a few cow uteri from Farmer Brown's back forty, maybe zonk a Galaxie 500 on I15 so they can put something up the comatose driver's nostril, you know, for kicks because that's how aliens are.

So, what these aliens have been doing, see, is they've been firing brain-rays at Americans to wipe out our long-term memories. I don't know why they're doing it, it's just something they're doing because their brains don't work like ours, or they have nefarious designs on our water, or they're afraid we're going to invent the warp drive and leave Earth, or, or, look: I don't know. Okay? I don't know.

It's just that it's as good an explanation as anything else I can come up with for the fact that we're really stupid, or a lot of us are, and ignorant and forgetful, and my other idea was that we all suffered some kind of brain injury walking headfirst into door frames or something, or we all ate lead paint chips as kids, and the truth is that neither one of those seem probable for the percentages of the population we're talking about. In my very human need for comprehensive explanations, I'm looking for something big, an overarching Theory Of Everything that might explain the mass stupidity afflicting our nation.

So I'm going with aliens. Big, dripping, boogerey aliens.

You're probably wondering what's set me off. You're thinking, "Oh, God, what is it this time?" It is, naturally, the damn Republicans. To be clear, this is a separate category from "Republicans" in general. My Grandmother, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincolns are/were all Republicans; Rush Limbaugh, Eric Cantor and John "Don't Call Me 'Boner'" Boehner are all damn Republicans. And so are teabaggers, no matter how much the whole damn lot of them like to insist they're not Republicans, they only vote exclusively for and give money exclusively to Republicans; actually, we can correct that now: the teabaggers are correct that they aren't Republicans, they are, in fact, damn Republicans. They are the sort of Republicans who, to steal from a bit of Founders-era graffiti (directed at John Jay) ought to be damned, and damn everyone who won't damn them and damn everyone who won't put lights in his window and sit up all night damning them. (Political rhetoric wasn't necessarily more civil in those days, but it surely had more style.)

Dammit.

I was reading a piece in Slate about how Cantor and Boehner won't stand up to the bigots in their party. And that led me to this piece in Politico about Republican-led legislatures trying to tweak their electoral laws to require particular pieces of paper before anyone can run for President. State legislatures, of course, can set any laws they damn well please for qualifying their ballots, but it's pretty obvious what shenanigans they're up to here: what they think is going to happen, is they think some Republican Secretary Of State in one or more states will fail to certify that Barack Obama is an American citizen in 2012 and that this will keep Obama off the ballot, which is the only way anyone in hell anyone would willingly vote for whichever chump the GOP nominates in two years.

It's a stupid idea partly because the only states where a Secretary Of State might fail to certify a sitting Democratic president for reelection for political reasons probably went red in 2008 anyway and are likely to again; I have to say "probably" partly because we know how apolitical and neutral Florida's Secretary Of State was in 2000, and besides the whole idea's a clusterfuck waiting to happen anyway. One is reminded, for instance, of all the jokes over whether McCain was really eligible to run since he was born in the Canal Zone at a time it may or may not have technically counted as American soil; I don't know that anybody took the idea terribly seriously, probably some left-wing maniac, but as I recall most commentators on the left pretty much said, "Ha-ha-ha, wouldn't that be funny," and then another shiny object appeared and everybody went monkeyish over that. At any rate, it's the sort of thing that, once passed, is unlikely to affect its target but will then lie abandoned in the muddy fields like an unexploded piece of WWII ordnance until someone trips over it and gets blown all to hell for no good reason.

But what was really amusing and infuriating was this: remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger was popular? As a governor, I mean, not at a skin-covered time-traveling robot. I know, I know: thanks to those aliens, that may be outside of your memory. You may have to take my word for it: once upon a time, long, long ago (we're talking, like, six, seven years, maybe), Arnold Schwarzenegger was a popular state governor. There was even talk about... wait for it, wait for it... amending the Constitution so he could be President.

Okay, okay, maybe not a lot of talk. Maybe not a lot of serious talk. But a third of Republicans were okay with amending the Constitution so that a foreigner could become President--and I'll bet they're glad they didn't do it, now that there's a crypto-Kenyan socialist Muslim in the White House! If they had memories, or even higher brain functions, they might be feeling like they dodged a bullet... a Kenyan bullet.

But there's the point, anyway: it's funny how the damn Republicans (as opposed to the just Republicans) seem to be folks who subscribe to the rule that rules are for other people. I wonder how many of the folks pushing for changing their states' election rules would be all about how unfair and retrograde the Framers' intent was if it were 2004 and the issue were whether a popular Austrian-American governor ought to be Presidential material. It's much in the same vein as the way they're all about the sanctity of marriage even when they're multiple divorcees who've done things like served one of their ex-wives with divorce papers while she was in a cancer ward, or they're against the gay sex unless they're lonely at the airport, or the way they'll preach a righteous sermon about no man being above the law even as they're violating campaign-finance laws by laundering corporate money to candidates (note to Tom DeLay: guess you were right after all). Rules and laws are something to trip the other guy up with, not guidelines and boundaries for one's own behavior. Do as thou wilt, and for God's sake don't get caught, that is the whole of the letter of the law as far as some of these choads are concerned. The only standard is the double standard, forever and ever, amen.

But it's not their fault. This is what I'm realizing. It can't possibly be that they're a bunch of amoral cretins lacking scruples; they had mamas, and I am one prone to assuming that their mamas must have raised them right. Okay. Granted. I have no evidence of that and I am only relying on my foolish optimism and sunny tendency to assume the best of folks even when they're trying to push their fangs through my bootheel. Still. I am relying on the hypothesis that the reason they have such a hard time with standards is that they can't actually remember what the standards are. See? It's hard to be consistent when your long-term memory is wanked because of nefarious alien invaders, hard to follow rules when you forgot about them during your episodes of lost time and the floating on the beam of light and all the probing, aya-aya-aya, what is with all these aliens and all the nasal and anal probing?

Think of the states proposing electoral reforms to keep the aliens (aliens!) off the ballot: all these heartland states in the middle of the map. And then think of the states that are always reporting black helicopters and bovine dissections: notice anything? The aliens are flying over the American heartland, removing the memories from conservative voters so they can't keep their history straight, eviscerating their memories the way they chop up a cow's nether parts. It all makes sense. This is why Glenn Beck sounds plausible to them, not because they're living paranoid lives waiting for the saucer people to come back (though that surely makes them receptive), but because their memories of high school history are collected in jars in a central chamber of the mothership behind the dark side of the moon. And anytime one of these poor bastards watching Beck or O'Reilly says, "Waitaminute, Martha, I think that's bullshit," well, it doesn't help because his and Martha's memory of the conversation gets yanked out his ass around three A.M. when Qlyxopteryx makes his/her/its evening rounds; his wife probably isn't even named Martha, she's just scared to say anything because he might ask her what her name is and she doesn't know, the memory of her name's onboard the mothership storage chamber, trapped in a slightly-glowing rose-colored jar on the third shelf from the bottom along with the first five years of her life. You know how it is, when you don't want to look stupid: you just nod your head agreeably and hope somebody changes the subject--Fox News is an entire network dedicated to that. Wish I'd thought of it, myself.

Aliens, I'm telling you: aliens. It all makes sense.

That, or American politics is full of stupid assholes. You tell me which hypothesis is more frightening.