CHAPTER THREE

“It might sound odd, but as a kid, I was fascinated with ants. I would watch
them for hours. It was amazing what they could accomplish working
together the way they did—under all those anthills were huge cities with
endless tunnels going in all directions. They could accomplish this with
brains no larger than the head of a pin. But I think what I really admired
was their marching. They’d crawl in single file lines, one after the
other, half way across the yard, all following a leader to some place
he alone knew existed”.
Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At The Zero Hour

“We live life as if were a carnival. We give our attention not to he who
has something to say, but to he who yells the loudest.
We listen not to those who can speak with authority,
but to those who tell us what we want to hear. We elect
not those most qualified to serve, but those who are most popular.”
Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus

The 2012 presidential election was pretty much typical in every way. The Republicans condemned the Democrats, with a great deal of truth, as the party of the tax and spend. Democrats, as is their knee jerk reaction, condemned the Republican Party as the mouthpiece of the rich and famous. Republicans reminded the populace over and over that “liberal” was a word that meant intellectual (not like you and me) agent of (malignant) change; below the Mason-Dixon line, it was synonymous with an odd-sounding New Yorker-type who doesn’t know shit about what life is really all about. Democrats called for an election of inclusion, one in which all people of all parties could come together, all the while casting the Republicans as those cold uncaring in-laws who could tell you everything you were doing wrong yet somehow could never stop to help you make things right.
Both parties played the old time-tested charges and arguments. But Samuel Parsons played the game on a level that made Richard Nixon and Karl Rove seem like touchy-feely California new agers sitting down to a spot of organic tea.
While many thought Parsons was an unthinking loose cannon, to Hal Simpson, it appeared that he had willfully taken a page from Spiro Agnew’s 1972 game book. Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” became Parsons’ “palpable pulse of piss-poor political palaver.” Just as Agnew was happiest serving as Nixon’s attack dog, Parsons found he relished his role as his party’s hit man—his shoot from the hip, take no prisoners attitude fit him like a glove. There were recurring rumors Romney and his staff were disenchanted with the name calling, the quoting of statistics that could not be found, and the presentation of truths that were, at best, deliberate fabrications, but no one would say so on the record. After all, it wasn’t like he was waving a paper in front of the cameras with the names of hundreds of subversives in the State Department.
But did the voters know that Obama had promised the ayatollahs in Iran enough uranium for six nuclear weapons so they could destroy Israel, thus drawing America into a war in order that Nancy Pelosi could be installed as the American Governor in Tehran? That Obama had secretly colluded with Yemeni pirates to board only vessels of companies that had refused to pay tribute to the Democratic National Committee? That the liberal media that had so punished Tiger Woods with stories of his indiscretions with white women refused to do the same to Barack Obama, even though the two of them had spent a weekend in Chicago with three of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends?
That the Democrats had included a secret provision in their Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 to create death panels in which doctors could decide who would live and who would die, even if you were sick with no more than a common cold? That if the Health Act were overturned, the government would be able to give $75,000 to every man, woman and child in the country between the ages of nine and ninety?
Or that the CIA had photographs of Obama’s mother in bed with Leonid Brezhnev? (Stories about Ann Dunham being in bed with the pope that first showed up on Facebook and then spread around the internet were apparently posted by a minor Republican office holder in North Carolina when he “sort of” got his facts wrong in his post.) That Mexican drug cartel thugs had crucified three Border Patrol agents when they attempted to arrest a drug runner from Juarez?
These and other such rantings were carried in daily news reports, were replayed dozens of times every day in paid political ads on televisions and radios, and were related and repeated thousands of times in internet blogs and postings. At first, the Obama campaign, against the advice of Secretary of State Kerry, ignored these ridiculous charges, discovering only too late one of the unalterable laws in the age of mass communication and questionable media coverage: many will think that if it’s in the paper and on TV, it must be true. Others might be dubious, but just as they are accustomed to think where there is smoke, there must be fire, so will many voters feel that behind each overstatement, there must be some element of truth. After all, if Obama and Bill Clinton smoked cigars in the Oval Office as they watched secret tapes of a tryst between Nancy Pelosi and Hillary, then something must have happened, right? By the time the Democrats began denying the silliness threatening their campaign, their denials were seen as admissions of guilt. After all, if nothing had happened (and by now many voters were convinced something had), why were they denying it?
In the end, as in so many recent elections, the victor came out on top by the narrowest of margins, a winner in name only. In the weeks following the election, many feared the real winner was Samuel Parsons. Though Obama had been re-elected President, the media credited Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate to Parsons’ coat tail. While exit polls showed he was shunned in the election by the better educated, by the more affluent, and by minorities across the nation, early December post-election polls revealed an astonishing level of support for him to be the Republican nominee for President in 2016.