Mobocracy Lives

If Scott Brown defeats Martha Coakley in the US Senate special election this Tuesday in Massachusetts, a part of me wonders if it won’t mean the end of the Obama administration.

Meaning, that with the demise of health reform—which Scott’s election would enable by allowing congressional Republicans to filibuster it to death—the GOP’s next, most likely priority would be to continue blocking anything Obama brought up for a vote in the hopes of fully neutralizing his White House over the next three years. That is, until another Republican were elected president, and duly revived GOP initiatives championed by George W. Bush - initiatives (e.g. mass overspending, expansion of government, tax cuts for the wealthy) which largely created the historic recession we all enjoy today.

So in other words, if Barack Obama is sent to early retirement in ‘12, and his conservative rivals return to the same policies they held dear in the past decade, then we have learned nothing as an American electorate – much less as a nation.

While the Democrats in power are hardly the model of competence, the Republican Party in the last decade all but crippled the United States with a toxic cocktail of ineptitude, war-mongering, Laissez-faire stances toward financial regulation, wild spending, and creative interpretations of treaties and constitutional law. And if this is truly what the US voting public wants to return to in '12 via an angry rush to “throw the bums out” (as we are seeing in Massachusetts now) after solidly rejecting the very same animal in '08, then so be it.

We deserve whatever we get – even if it means a President Sarah Palin who can't decide on a favorite founding father without being pressured by Glenn Beck.