MIDGET GLADIATORS

Some idle impressions of the New Hampshire debates.

The Democrats: Only one of these people ever actually ran an executive branch of government. As usual it's the questions that never get asked are key. No one asks exactly what Hillary Clinton's experience is. She was the wife of a governor and president and she is a Senator who is not responsible for anything except proposing and voting on legislation. Apart from being Bill Clinton's wife what has she ever really done? These people are so intimidated by feminists that they just can't state the obvious. Obama's seat in the Senate is barely warm yet he is offering himself to the public as the commander in chief. He is the living embodiment of the winning personality over actual merit in public life. He is a great salesman for himself, using considerable skill in deploying the language of aspiration and ideals to elide telling us what his concrete plans and policies would be.

When pressed, all the Democratic candidates describe themselves as "Agents of Change." In fact they are agents of envy and avarice. Envy in the case of minorities, illegals, dyspeptic deviates, criminals and loafers of all kinds, and avarice in the case of the teachers unions, big labor, public employee unions and the legions of parasites living off the taxpayers and funding their campaigns. If they were truly agents of change they would be lynched by their own supporters. If one listens to them with care and blue pencils all the double speak, they stand for only one thing, the power inherent in the democratic process to steal from the productive in order to buy the votes from the multitudes of the inadequate and immoral.

The Republicans: They all seem to parse their promises with the skill of used car salesmen. They speak about what their focus groups report to be the hot button issues while making no actual promises. Thompson seemed the best of a bad lot tonight. None of them will stop the Third World invasion of our country or defend our national interest in a globalized markets. They all seem to represent Wall Street and the Neocons over the middle class bulk of the nation. They seem to believe that we are all just a nation of investors with no jobs to lose or traditional communities to preserve of love. They are the party of homo economicus.

Huckabee is a facile presenter but I fear he is very wrong headed about so many issues he might be a genuine disaster. He comes across as a right-of-center Clinton, a born triangulator untroubled by intellectual consistencies. He is a Christian do-gooder rather than a Christian statesman and that's a bit chilling.

It's troubling that they don't disavow the current President and his neoconservative handlers. The country may inflict a Clinton or Obama on itself in retaliation against Bush. My feeling is that the Republican party owes Bush nothing. He has mulishly persisted in failed adventures and surrounded himself with dodgy characters. The enmity he and they generate will tar the GOP for a generation if the party does not repudiate this fool and his policies in a loud and convincing manner. If Romney were to say that the neocons would play no part in his administration it would go a long way to bring back some faith in the party.

But this is a pipe-dream. Republicans have ridden far on the backs of compliant conservative voters. Even the most block headed conservatives now perceive that the party that talks about smaller government and the constitution and traditional values never delivers. It's all just happy talk to gull the suckers.