CANNIBAL TIME REFLECTIONS

By H.N. Burdett

During the first Republican presidential candidate debate of this interminable election season, Newt Gingrich reminded his rivals of Ronald Reagan's admonition: "Thou shall speak no evil of a fellow Republican."

Gingrich knew full well that his cautionary note would fall upon deaf ears. But the former Speaker of the House of Representatives misses no opportunity to identify with Reagan and boast of his own authorship of Reagan's Contract with America.

The question was never really about whether the contenders' long knives would be unsheathed, sharpened and turned on one another, but when. The eight GOP aspirants for the White House participating in these got'cha forums - easily the most entertaining television sitcoms now running - have settled into the down and dirty business of devouring their own.

Cannibal Time has arrived in all of its full glory. And Karl Rove, the all-time heavyweight champion of campaign chicanery, professes not even to have a nag in the hunt. Turd Blossom, as he was lovingly addressed by George W. Bush, the Pinocchio to Rove's Gepetto, is just too doggone preoccupied carrying out his Grand Plan to waste time on these preliminary bouts to determine who will head his party's ticket next year. He is laser-focused on Republican domination of Congress for the next 30-40 years.

If the recipes for missionary stew the GOP aspirants are cooking up for one another do not actually bear Rove's own fingerprints, they sure read like pages ripped from his well-worn playbook. Rove absorbed the rudiments of the fine art of political mischief at the knee of that past master, Lee Atwater, and took it to new depths by guiding the hands-down worst president in United States history to re-election.

This time around, Rove is masterminding American Crossroads, a deep-pocketed, conservative political action group intent upon preserving government of, by and for the 1 percent, by wresting control of Capitol Hill rather than the White House. But just as old firehouse horses snorted and stomped their demand to be hitched up to the hook-and-ladder wagons whenever the alarm clanged, Rove becomes restless on the sidelines of the presidential nomination battle. There's less certainty about which presidential candidate Dubya's onetime "boy genius" favors than there is about the candidate he yearns to destroy. That would be Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Exhibit A: After Governor Perry leveled the charge that Ben Bernanke is guilty of nothing less than "treason" (a crime punishable by state execution), Rove ignored the Reagan dictum by telling the Fox News Channel, "You don't accuse the Federal Reserve Chairman of being a traitor to his country. And suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas - you know, that is, again, not a Presidential statement."

Exhibit B: When Perry expressed his view that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme," Rove seized the opportunity to allow as how this was "toxic" evidence that the Lone Star State governor is not a good fit for the White House. Again, Rove might have remained above the fray by using that golden opportunity to say nothing.

Exhibit C: Responding to Perry's comment that he believes President Obama's birth certificate is bogus, Rove interjected: "You associate yourself with a nutty view like that, and you damage yourself." Just as Pavlov's pooches salivated when the dinner bell sounded but before the vittles were served, Rove chose to brush aside the Great Communicator's advice and burnish his own reputation as the grating opionator.

But Karl Rove is not the only Republican intent upon taking down the Texas governor. Beseiged by accusations of sexual harassment by women employed by the National Restaurant Association when he was its chief lobbyist, Herman Cain told his supporters: "We now know and have been able to trace it(dredging up his past) back to the Perry campaign that stirred this up, in order to discredit me and slow me down." A spokesman for Perry held that Cain's suggestion was "reckless and false," then slyly raised the possibility that Mitt Romney's campaign just might be behind the surfacing of allegations against Cain. A spokesman for the Romney campaign simply dismissed this as "Not true."

Even Rep. Michele Bachmann, once the darling of the no-taxes-no-how-no-way Tea Party before she sank like a rock in the polls, got in on the act of trashing Perry. The Minnesota congresswoman took umbrage at the buzz that the tea-baggers are pressing her to exit the GOP nomination contest, then accused the Perry campaign of spreading a false rumor.

With Mitt Romney hopelessly mired at not much above 25 percent in the polls, which approximates what remains of the moderate wing of the Republican party - may it rest in peace - the presumably more authentic conservative Republican candidates are hell-bent on knocking one another out of their path to become the GOP nominee. Their reasoning is that if one paragon of conservative purity can rise from the pack, Romney, apparently at a loss to pinpoint any single core issue on which he has held a consistent conservative position, is toast.

And so Republican candidates are driven to slice and dice the Texas governor, who would have us believe that his candidacy has the endorsement of You-Know-Who. Though Cain and Bachmann have muddled Biblical prophecy with similar claims about the anointment of their own candidacies, the Celestial Powers indeed appear to be tilting the playing field in Governor Perry's favor by endowing him with the advantage of the bulging purses of oil barons.

As the intriguing game of inside politics spins wildly toward a conclusion that can only be guessed, relevant issues are short-changed. And they are, of course, multitudinous. U.S. unemployment and home foreclosures tear at the fabric of American society. The nation is plagued with staggering national debt. Conflicting obsessions with defense spending and entitlement programs remain inviolable. A solid Congressional bloc is pledged to stand firm on not raising taxes at a time when infrastructure deteriorates precariously, the country remains committed to a costly war, and rogue nations with various reasons for despising the United States either have access to, or are at the very brink of, obtaining nuclear weapon capability.

While a segment of rank-and-file citizens under the rubric of the Tea Party rails against wasteful government spending, Occupy Wall Street protestors vent their rage at the greed of bloated corporations and financial institutions that have milked and bilked countless investors dry, placing laissez-faire capitalism at the precipice of dissolution. And members of the two major U.S. political parties are at a standoff, refusing to budge from their respective entrenched positions of protecting the wealthiest, on one hand, and, on the other, preserving Social Security and Medicare while seeking what each and every other industrial nation has: national health insurance.

At the founding of the United States, Thomas Jefferson posited that from time to time the tree of liberty would need to be nurtured with the blood of patriots. Miraculously, only during the American Civil War did such an occasion arise internally. The echoes of that butchery pitting brothers against brothers have resounded so horrifically that nearly 150 years in its wake, grievances between states and regions have been settled at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Nonetheless, a global revolution is in progress. It began with Arab Spring in the Middle East, where blood ran in the streets but the uprisings continued undeterred.

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements here are not simply parodies of the revolutions across the pond; they are very real. An enormous question mark looms over their staying power. What will rise from the ashes here is no more known than the ultimate outcome of the outcries elsewhere. What does seem likely is that when the smoke finally clears, a different world may well emerge. Whether it will be a better one or even more dangerous than it is today will ultimately depend on the wisdom and actions of its leaders.

In this country, where confidence in national lawmakers plunges toward non-existent, and where the performance of the executive branch is acceptable to less than 50 percent of the electorate, there are few clues that any of the Republican presidential candidates, or any politicians of either party, are paying all that much attention to the mammoth tasks remaining before whomever is elected to lead the reeling, wobbling country that is known far and wide as the most powerful sustained democracy in the free world.
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