{"id":3705,"date":"2011-08-19T17:57:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T21:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=3705"},"modified":"2011-08-19T17:57:19","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T21:57:19","slug":"headbangers-ball-the-gop-is-rockin-to-the-beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2011\/08\/headbangers-ball-the-gop-is-rockin-to-the-beat.html","title":{"rendered":"Headbangers Ball: The GOP is Rockin’ to the Beat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Headbanger\"<\/a>The blogs are perpetually alight with the gaffs, lies, misstatements, and factually challenged utterances of the GOP Presidential candidates field.\u00a0 Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are so reality challenged it isn’t even fun to pick on them anymore.\u00a0 (Well, almost…)\u00a0 Poor Rick Santorum, no stranger to wacky rhetoric, can’t get a sound-bite in edgewise.\u00a0 Why are people remotely listening to these whackjobs other than for the sheer entertainment value?<\/p>\n

Then, I heard former GOP Chairman Michael Steel speak this morning.\u00a0 He was being asked about Perry’s latest claims about Creationism being taught in Texas.\u00a0 Steel noted that it’s only August, 2011.\u00a0 At this point, candidates are not yet speaking to wide audiences.\u00a0 You have to take what they say in the context of who was listening in the audience.\u00a0 And what Perry said resonated with the crowd he was speaking to.\u00a0 Hmmmm.<\/p>\n

On a completely different vector, earlier today I was included on the distribution of an email touting the horrors of HR 4646.\u00a0 The essence being that Obama is trying to take all your money and ruin the country.\u00a0 (Insert audible sigh here.)\u00a0 I readily debunked<\/a> it, but I’m still responding to people defending the initial email, regardless of the facts.<\/p>\n

What occurs to me is that politicians, pundits, and emails thundering about God and country, warning of apocalyptic conspiracies, and shouting from their ideological towers are the political equivalent of a musician standing on a stage before a crowd of half intoxicated college students and screaming, “Are you ready to rock?”<\/p>\n

Hell yeah.\u00a0 Where’s my lighter<\/del> cell phone?\u00a0 You’re in the moment.\u00a0 You feel the beat.\u00a0 You don’t really give a rat’s ass what the lyrics are.\u00a0 It feels good.\u00a0 It feels right.\u00a0 And if you’re not at the concert, you just don’t get it.<\/p>\n

The difference is that the morning after a concert, the lyrics really don’t matter.\u00a0 But the morning after an election, they matter a great deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

However, the morning after a concert, the lyrics really don’t matter. But the morning after an election, they matter a great deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[118,40,22,41],"class_list":["post-3705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-2012-elections","tag-gop","tag-political-ideology","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3705"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3716,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions\/3716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}