The Widdershins

Morning Widdershin friends — for those of you in the Northeast who are in the path of the projected blizzard, why not consider giving the guys who drive the snowplows a ride to work?

As a kid, no matter how sick I was, I always felt better after watching a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show.  I loved Mayberry and all of its characters.  There was Andy spinning homespun life lessons, Floyd coiffing on Main Street, Goober selling his quarter a gallon gasoline, Aunt Bee who was Mayberry’s first feminist who could whip up the best fried chicken this side of Mt. Pilot, but also pilot an airplane, and then there was Barney Fife.

Barney was my personal favorite — totally lacking a whit of self-awareness, always acting like a Chihuahua trying to herd a Brahma bull, and always managing to find the most negative aspect in the most positive situations.  For good measure, if it was going to rain on a parade, Barney would always bring his own watering can.  Undoubtedly, Barney Fife was one of the all time greatest teevee characters — so successful was Don Knotts’ Barney Fife that he became type cast as the well-meaning, but clueless, bumbling brunt of jokes in a lifetime litany of sitcoms.

The Republican Party has come to remind me of Deputy Fife.  Just two months from a campaign where you heard nothing but the dystopian disasters awaiting us unless the Ayn Randian wrecking crew was elected, there is not one grandiosely ballyhooed campaign policy that is dared to be whispered in polite political circles.  To hear them tell it, they were the Knights Templar standing between us and a stock market crash, the dollar being in free fall, continuing housing market doldrums, crippling deficits, skyrocketing interest rates, and general economic collapse as our Chinese bankers and overlords came to foreclose on our way of life.

Isn’t it amazing that not a mewl or chirp can be heard of any of their policy prescriptions just two months after they were spewed at us with so much Citizens United dark money.  I find this remarkable as we look at just the last couple of weeks — the stock market hitting pre-2008 levels, the housing market rebounding, the deficit projected to be down by almost a half trillion dollars, interest rates continuing at near historic lows, and of all the industrialized economies of the world, while others are experiencing double and triple dip recessions, we are the envy.  While job creation is still slow, the November and December job numbers were revised upwards by a quarter million and January’s job creation exceeded expectations.

In the face of all this optimism, just like Barney Fife, the Republican leadership can be heard to say, “Yeah, but…”

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