Elephants, jackasses and you

There was some hope the election season would take a brief respite before the November round begins. You know, kind of like the 15 minutes of intermission you get at the circus to soak in the spinning and the fire eating and the jumping to different positions and the disappearing acts and the clowns punching each other in the eyes before the elephants and jackasses return to do tricks and use smoke and attractive men and women in skimpy shiny suits to persuade us the magic is real.

It’s only if you hang around after the circus that sometimes you see the wires and harnesses and other connections the circus stars used to make their leaps more daring, their landings more solid and make more certain and faithful their words. You also see the behind-the-scenes workers cleaning up what is always left when elephants and jackasses do tricks for your applause.

But there is no intermission. Put the cotton candy away. Make sure to count your change when the pretty girl with the bountiful cleavage sells your kid the $25 light-up toy made in China. Watch for wires.

No less than 24 hours after U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln won her runoff race against uber-liberal Bill Halter, she began a wild attempt to spin back to the right. She stumbled. Bad. It’s possible that after spinning to the left to defeat Halter she was unaccustomed to spinning to the right and lost her balance.

What she did immediately after her runoff victory was to tell the media she was not the deciding vote on passage of the new federal health care bill. The problem is, she ran a television ad in the primary election in which she said, “I cast the deciding vote to pass health care reform because fixing the problem is more important than politics.”

This is like Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts who was for the money for the troops before he was against it. Or vice versa.

Lincoln’s clumsiness would be one thing for a rookie politician, but she’s a more than 15-year veteran of Congress. And the clumsiness might also be excused if she forgot the details on how she voted on paving a 3-mile stretch of former tribal road in some third-world country of which the paving money was contained in one of those bulky appropriations bills for which the ink required to print demands a Hazmat team be on standby. But this was THE federal fricking health care bill; the bill that puts a team of bureaucrats between you and your doctor — if you can find a doctor.

It was so bad even John Brummett, the liberal-and-proud-of-it columnist for Stephens Media noted of Lincoln: “Now, some accuse her of lying one time or the other. But she isn’t. Lincoln’s flaw is what I said here — an absolute lack of core principle. Both statements are true. It just depends on what her political expediency required at the time.”

And then there’s Lincoln’s opponent in the U.S. Senate race: U.S. Rep. John Boozman— the parallel-universe opposite of Captain Charisma. If you ever walk into a room with 100 men and don’t recognize Boozman, just look for the guy who appears to be having the least amount of fun. He’s probably having a blast, but you’d never know it from his emotions. He’s the Mr. Spock of Congress.

That’s not to say Rep. Boozman is not a nice, amiable guy. He is. But he’s possibly too nice. A U.S. Senator should be, using the parlance of our President, the kind of person unafraid to kick some ass from time to time. Heck, I’d settle for just hearing Boozman use the word “ass” in a sentence, even if the sentence was, “That guy at The City Wire is a real ass.”

But if his handlers are smart, we’re not likely to hear much from Boozman until Nov. 3. Roby Brock, a political journalist and analyst in Little Rock, says all Boozman needs to say from now to election day is: “I’m John Boozman and I approved this message.” Which is to say the best thing Boozman can do is to go ice fishing at the North Pole for the next five months and let a public relations machine craft clever messages to remind Arkansans that his friends in Washington aren’t named Pelosi, Reid or Obama. And if he does that well, he’ll kick ass in November.

Up here in the 3rd Congressional District, there appear to be some remaining hard feelings between the establishment Republicans and Republicans who supported and endorsed Rogers Mayor Steve Womack. Womack defeated Sen. Cecile Bledsoe of Rogers in the June 8 runoff.

Womack now faces Democrat David Whitaker in the November election. The last time a Democrat held the 3rd District seat, no one had heard of Neil Armstrong. About the only chance Whitaker has to end the Republican hold of the seat is if the hard feelings between the establishment Republicans and Womack Republicans fester into some sort of public feud AND Womack gets caught smoking pot with illegal aliens at an abortion clinic while working directly with President Obama to raise or implement taxes on ammunition, bibles and high school football tickets.

Womack’s problem, according to the establishment Republicans directly and indirectly encouraged by the Asa Hutchinson and Mike Huckabee wings of the Arkansas Republican Party, is that he’s not conservative enough. It’s not enough that Womack has said he’s for smaller government, less taxes, a secure border, flag waving, motherhood and pig sooie, it’s that he didn’t express those beliefs with the right vigor, venom and vernacular. Therefore, Womack is a RINO — Republican In Name Only. 

This RINO business is silly. Apparently, there is this narrow band of Republicanism that is sacrosanct and all other versions are evil ploys by progressives (i.e., socialists) seeking to dilute and destroy our Judeo-Christian beliefs, the Constitution and Wal-Mart. To me, RINO means Republican Idiots Narrowing Options. The only folks who will dilute and destroy conservative Republicans are conservative Republicans with a Jihadist passion for some impossible-to-define conservative purity.

And then there are the Fort Smith municipal elections for city board and mayor. This round is not going to be just a circus. It will be a low-rent circus wrapped in the theater of professional wrestling and packaged neatly into a box of disingenuous dogma only Elmer Gantry could appreciate.

We’ll appreciate later the municipal races. For now, we advise you to bone up, buckle up and try not to throw up.