Today’s mishmash has a theme : bad things happening to the American Right.

Why? Because I love you.

We’ll start off with a fave from the past who has recently returned from his justly deserved grave of obscurity, Newt “Let’s Shut Down The Government And See Who Gets Blamed” Gingrich, and his recent insistence on calling Obama the “food stamp President”.

Sounds like pure Karl Rove poison, doesn’t it? Megajoules of evil, prejudice, bigotry, hate, and foulness distilled and concentrated down to the three words most likely to flip all the wrong switches in people’s brains to make them incapable of reason or compassion and hence force them to be just as much of a stinking pile of cesspool runoff as yourself and your heartless reptile brained cohorts.

It’s called politics!

But I think this sort of thing is losing its power and causing stronger blowback with each application of its slithering tendrils. This “food stamp President” shit is clearly coded racism, and it’s going to be a very difficult statement for him to justify if questioned on it at all. And the nice thing about election cycle politics is that you do not have to rely on that flaccid lump of quivering adipose tissue known laughably as “American journalism” to somehow penetrate the right wing reality prevention field and ask the awkward questions.

Your Republican opponents will do it! In particular, this is the sort of thing that Rand Paul or another dark horse Libertarian type to pick up and use.

Tell us, Newt : what, exactly, do you mean by “food stamp President”?

As proof that this brand of political poison is losing its potency, let me direct your kind attention next to this article about how ratings are declining for the right wing talk radio sphere of hate.

I am particularly heartened by the emergence of a “radical centrist” alternative, people who take a more balanced view of things and toe no party line and do not hand their independence of conscience in at the door in order to join a political team.

I have been calling myself a radical centrist for over a decade now, and I truly think two-party political thinking is rapidly going the way of the leisure suit. People are increasingly realizing that two options is simply not enough. People want to be represented by someone or some group who comes a lot closer to pleasing their own political palate than a two item menu could possibly provide.

The era of the dogmatic and doctrinaire adherence to a Team A or Team B approach is finally reaching its long deserved sunset. People are increasingly willing to break with the pack mentality and say “What if neither option is good enough? What then?”

America, in the opinion of this Canadian, has been in desperate need of a strong third party (and fourth, and fifth… ) for a long time. The political marketplace needs more than a token minimum of competition in order to provide the voters with what they want, let alone what they need and what they deserve.

Finally, I am glad to see that the recent outing of the Koch brothers as the bastard billionaires bankrolling the majority of the right wing evil in America is bringing them to the attention of documentary filmmakers like Robert Greenwald, who will be taking them on in a new film.

This is exactly the sort of direction I like to see in this new era of citizen journalism. These bastard billionaires seem unreachable, but that’s a thin facade. In this modern era of Google journalism, a remarkable amount of rhetorical damage can be done to the mighty and the powerful simply by bringing together freely available public knowledge and putting it into a comprehensible narrative. You don’t need to land an interview with one of these whales or get “access” in any sense in order to launch your attack.

You just need a computer and a blog. Ahem.

I also approve of Greenwald’s taking a radical and personal approach to his anti-Koch campaign, finding the many homes of the Koch brothers and filming himself and others knocking on their doors and trying to get answers to questions as to why they are messing with America like they do.

Sure, it’s all very theatrical in a Michael Moore way, but someone has to remind these people that, no matter how rich you get, you are still a citizen of a nation just like everyone else.

I wonder if they would agree.