Mama, I want my Wawa!

Via Fallows, a snapshot of the Romneycade beating the hustings for votes, and the Borg discovers the wonder of...Wawa!

"Romney on the stump, at a historic iron furnace in Cornwall, near Lebanon, using the hoagie-ordering experience at the WaWa as a parable for what's right and wrong in America. (Wrong: a doctor told him that he had to fill out a 33-page change-of-address form, several times, to get the post office to send his mail -- including reimbursement checks -- to his new location. That is what happens with government-run organizations where you have "no competition." Right: at WaWa, great hoagies. Also, very efficient touch-pad ordering system. This is what you get with competition.)"

It's hard to know just where to start with this fucktardry, but let's try starting with the Wawa.

I used to live in the northeast and these things are the local 7-Eleven-equivalent there. They make decent hoagies (sub sandwiches, to you fellow Left Coasters) but not that great; any local hoagie shop is usually better, and most Northeast towns have several. I've had a couple of Wawa hoagies and they're usually distinguished by the same qualities all fast food enjoys; a sort of "enh" flavor resulting from cheap products cranked out in volume. Processed cheese, mass-produced meat; you know the drill.

And here's the thing; they, like most chain stores, use their bankroll to do their level best to put those little local hoagie shops - the ones that do actual interesting things with local produce, cheeses, sauces, and meats - out of business.

So the local owner loses his business, and (if he's lucky) ends up a wage slave making hoagies for the Wawa down the street. This is good, because it's "competition"! Freedom, amiright! In the same way that putting a pair of ten-ounce gloves on you and putting you in the ring with the guy who's just gone fifteen rounds for the pro welterweight title at Caesar's is "competition". Competition! Amiright?

I have no idea what the "touch-pad ordering system" is or what it does, but, really, who gives a fuck? What benefit do I get out of it? Why is it better than, say, talking to a real live person and ordering a hoagie? Or, worse - what if it puts that person out of a job? Why is that "good", competition or no? I've actually started avoiding the auto-checker at our local Fred Meyer because, frankly, I don't want to give Kroger (the way-the-fuck-back-East ginormous grocery chain that bought our local Portland chain and gave us their fine Kroger products in place of the local stuff that Fred's used to stock) the excuse to lay off a live person.

"Competition", frankly, is one of those tidy little Republican myths, like the welfare queen and the anchor baby and the birth-control-abortion, that looks less impressive the more you look at it. Turns out that many forms of "competition" provide benefits mostly for the people who own the companies, and result in lower wages and fewer jobs as companies "compete" to sell cheaper crap for lower prices.

That is when they're not actively colluding to sell cheap crap for HIGH prices - try and drive around your town and find a gas station making a profit on the volume of selling gas for "low, low prices!!!". Sheeyeah; call me when you find one.

So I'd expect a Republican to be as stupid as a bag of hammers where "competition" is concerned.

But then there's that damn 33-page form, the paper embodiment of Evil Big Gummint.

Which is where I wish that these gomers had actually been forced to serve in the military.

Because Romney - like every GOP sunofabitch that draws breath - luuuuurves him some military. The U.S. fightin' men and women are just jake with him; they're the living embodiment of everything Good^TM and Right^TM about America. Amiright?

But if he's pissed off about all that non-"competitive" government bureaucracy what effing world has HE been living on?

Because there's no bureaucracy in the world like the U.S. Army.

Because armies - like insurance, like firefighting, like policing - aren't in the business of doing something cheap at low price. They need to do things that other people can't or won't do (unless they're ridiculous or insane, like the sort of people who fight for pay) and they need to do it right the first time.

So governments tend to be all about rules and making notes to file and filling in forms. That stuff gets out of hand, oftentimes, but the mere existence of a long form has absolutely nothing to do with the "value" of government and what it does.

In fact, the rottenest thing about the modern GOP and their current nominee is their and his insistence on the zombie Reagan lie about how "government is the problem".

Why would anyone running for political office insist that the very thing they want you to elect them to do is a "problem"?

Unless they want you to think of that thing as bad, unless they want you to expect that thing to BE bad, so that they can then do it badly and not get beaten to a bloody pulp for it?

Or unless they want you to forget that if you aren't part of governing your nation, if the government is a problem and "goes away" that you remain a single, relatively powerless individual and that there will be someone - something - still there to seize onto that power the failure of government leaves as a vacuum.

Oh. Yeah. Them. Riiiiight.

Y'think?

Gah. Honestly, the mere fact that this lying sack of shit is within a couple of percentage points of becoming the next President makes me very, very tired. If we're not lucky this November we're going to get the government we deserve, and while I will derive a certain vicious satisfaction in that my schadenfreude will be very grim indeed.