(THE SCENE: Professor Ray Langston’s graduate seminar in political psychology at a Canadian university. It’s the Monday after the 2012 U.S. election. The students are seated around an oblong table. Professor Langston enters and takes his seat.)

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Reg: “I did, but only because I had to for this class. I don’t know what the point was—The U.S. is so religiously and economically insane it didn’t matter who won.”

Judith: “Well, I’m glad that Obama was re-elected! The country and the world really dodged a bullet!”

Stan: “Yeah! a ‘dumb-dumb’!” (General laughter from the professor and students—all except Ezra, who doesn’t see the humour.)

Ezra: “I don’t see how you can laugh! Obama is a communist and a national security threat! His Middle East policy amounts to throwing Israel under the bus. Romney is 100% behind Israel and its need to attack Iran. That’s a real American president for you!”

Stan: “Are you for real? Israel has had Obama on a choke chain since he got elected, and as for being communist (voice rising), that’s just a typical right-wing smear tactic! You’re like that idiot woman in Kentucky who squawked ‘communist’ about Obama, but when questioned by MSNBC reporter Chris Matthews had nothing intelligent to say.”

Reg: (to the professor) “You see what I mean about insanity? Ezra must be part American.”

Prof. Langston: “Well, for better or worse, Barack Obama has been re-elected. Is anyone surprised that Romney did so poorly, and what does his loss mean for the future of the Republicans?

Stan: “First of all, your question begs the existence of a Republican Party, but the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower bears no resemblance to the gang of reactionary, neo-fascist warmongers and robber barons that now run under its banner…”

Ezra: “Fascist?! Now who’s insane! This was a democratic election, one that will go down as the worst in U.S. history. Fascists don’t run in democratic elections.”

Judith: “Hitler and Mussolini both did.”

Ezra: “You know what I mean!”

Reg: (under his breath) “…said the idiot woman.”

Prof. Langston: “Alright, let’s put the personal insults aside—what about the result and why Romney did so poorly? Stan, you were saying…”

Stan: “I think Romney and other like-minded right-wingers failed so spectacularly because they went out of their way to alienate American voters.”

Reg: “What do you mean?”

Stan: “Well, for one thing, Romney and his Ayn Rand-worshipping twit of a running mate alienated untold numbers of female voters, even conservative ones, by calling for Roe vs. Wade to be overturned. They would have absolutely denied women the right to an abortion, even in the case of rape, saying a woman should be forced to have the baby. Even Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, called Romney unsuitable.

“Second, Ohio Republicans deliberately tried to disenfranchise Black voters by cutting back early voting days and hours. The cheat was obvious and the result backfired. Black voters increased from 11% to 15% since the 2008 election, and helped Obama carried the state easily.

“Third, and most obviously, Romney was dishonest and inconsistent. In the first debate he lied 24 times, and not even convincingly!”

Stan: “No, but Obama would not utter the sort of imbecilities that Romney did. Take economics: Romney promised a balanced budget, a strong military and a strong economy.”

Ezra: “And you think that’s imbecilic?!”

Stan: “You tell me: Romney planned to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years, despite the Pentagon’s objections, and cut taxes by $5 trillion. That’s a revenue loss of $7.1 trillion with no plan to raise revenue to pay for it. How the hell does that add up to a balanced budget! So yes, Ezra, he’s an imbecile!”

Judith: “Excuse me—I’m having déjà vu.”

Prof. Langston: “How so?”

Judith: “This sounds just like something out of Ronald Reagan’s first term.”

Reg: “Hey, you’re right!”

Judith: “Reagan came into office promising a 600-ship navy, a massive upper-income tax cut, and massive increases in defence spending. During the campaign, then-candidate George H.W. Bush called it ‘voodoo economics’.”

Prof. Langston: “Excellent, Judith! Romney was reduced to recycling stale, discredited, Reagan-era voodoo economics because he had nothing useful or intelligent to say. ”

Ezra: “Unless you’re a conservative.”

Stan: (to Ezra) “Eisenhower was an intelligent conservative. Romney is an anti-statist simpleton.”

Judith: “If Romney had nothing useful or intelligent to say, and went out of his way to alienate voters, how did he expect to win the election?!”

Prof. Langston: “Ah, but which voters did he alienate? Surely, he didn’t intend to alienate all of them. Who was his real audience?”

Reg: “Well, follow the money! Those who financed Romney and other like-minded teabaggers were the voters that mattered.”

Prof. Langston: “And who were these vote buyers?”

Reg: “The Zionist-Industrial Complex. (to Ezra)—that’s a play on an Eisenhower reference.”

Ezra: “I guess as long as you can blame Israel, nothing else matters.”

Reg: “Why not blame Israel? Romney was clearly Netanyahu’s candidate, who, unlike Obama, endorsed unprovoked aggression against Iran in the name of Israel’s “security.” Romney’s concern for his own country was barely skin deep. In fact, if you peeled back his skin I bet you’d have found the endoskeleton of a zionist cyborg,”

Stan: (mimicking Arnold Schwarzenegger) “Ja, but this one ‘won’t be back!’”

Reg: (laughing) “One of Skynet’s duds!”

Judith: “You mean Skynetanyahu’s, don’t you?”

(Everyone, except Ezra, erupts into laughter. and Stan starts to muse about political cyborgs while only paying half attention to the class discussion.”

Prof. Langston: “Getting back on topic, where does the money lead, Reg?”

Reg: “Much of it can be traced to Sheldon Adelson, zionist extremist and gambling mogul. He shelled out $53 million of his own money to bankroll Romney, influence key senate races and spread anti-Obama disinformation. He ended up taking a bath.”

Prof. Langston: “So what does that tell us?”

Judith: “Well… since corporate/zionist money funded Romney’s campaign, and since we all know that money talks, Romney ended up being the voice of that money, the voice of the privileged 1%.… Stan, you with us?”

Stan: (snaps back from his reverie) “Uh, yeah…it didn’t matter how ridiculous Romney sounded to intelligent voters because his role was to tell his backers what they wanted to hear, and that was supposed to be enough to win the election.”

Reg: “I thought the party hit bottom with John ‘Insane’ McCain and Sarah Palin, but this time I think it has. If Romney, with all of his hundreds of millions in Zio-Corp lucre couldn’t defeat an incumbent president who had been consistently pilloried, mocked, attacked, misrepresented, disrespected and smeared, then the party is truly finished. Stick a fork in it; it’s done!”

Judith: Not only that, but the success of the Obama campaign’s grassroots organization even led to major civil rights victories.”

Prof. Langston: “Such as?”

Judith: “Voters in Washington, Maine, Minnesota and Maryland refused to ban homosexual marriage. Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin, becoming the state’s first female and lesbian senator.”

Ezra: “Oh joy! Homosexuals are on the march. A victory for identity politics does not a civil rights movement make, Judith.”

Stan: “How typical of you to reduce a significant change in societal attitudes to a cliché. I suppose you think Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s spectacular failure to win a congressional seat for the teabaggers was the result of anti-Semitism rather than political judgment.”

Judith: “Don’t worry Ezra; there’s more. Voters in Montana and Colorado decided overwhelmingly to fight the Supreme Court’s odious “Citizen’s United” decision, which permitted corporations to give unlimited funds to dodgy third parties. Montana voters approved initiative I-166, which would deny corporations the right to claim the same constitutional rights as human beings, and Colorado voters passed Amendment 65 to empower the state’s congressional delegation to push for a constitutional amendment to permit Congress to overturn the Citizens United decision.”

Reg: “Don’t forget the states that voted to legalize marijuana use.”

Prof. Langston: “Besides sex and smoke, does anyone see something more fundamental in Romney’s flame out? Ezra, what do you make of the fact that 63% of the Jewish vote went to Obama, not Romney?”

Ezra: “I suppose a lot of Jews didn’t rate foreign policy highly and clung to their traditional democratic traditions. The Democratic Party is known as the Party of Israel, because President Harry Truman supported the creation of the Jewish State…”

Judith: “…after being bought off with a $2 million bribe from an Israel lobbyist.”

Ezra: “Now, look…”

Prof. Langston: “Stan, what do you think?”

Stan: “Ezra is looking for an excuse, not an answer. Israel lost heavily. Its armies of hasbarats, bagmen and media hatemongers gave it their best, yet they still could not convince the electorate that black was white. The U.S. public stared Israel down, and showed the world that, just perhaps, the fascist tide in America that began with Ronald Reagan had crested, though it will be a while before the fetid waters recede.”

Prof. Langston: “Well, since nature abhors a vacuum, what will rise to fill it?”

Reg: “Well, when you consider that most voting-age Americans have grown up in an age devoid of intelligent political debate, and have only seen the world through the warped prism of Isramerican exceptionalism, I really don’t know that anything can. I doubt that the U.S., as a political entity, is defensible in the near term.”

Prof. Langston: “You may be right, Reg. Since Obama won, seven southern states have signed petitions to secede from the union, claiming that Obama threatens their freedoms.”

Judith: “Yes, but this is just so much hot air and cornpone from states where the Bible is preferred to brains.”

Reg: “But the fact that so many millions of people actually believe Obama to be a threat to their freedoms because he believes in social spending pretty much proves my point—politics in the U.S. is dead. Zionist Jews and Christians killed it, or at least mortally wounded it.”

Stan: “Inasmuch as I agree with you, Reg, Obama is a threat to Americans’ freedoms. For starters, he has increased security state repression beyond the even what George W. Bush did, permitted the Guantánamo Torture Facility to continue, toed the zionist line on Palestine, bankrupted the country by bailing out greedy, irresponsible banks with TARP funds, approved the assassination of American citizens, and declared that Americans in the U.S. could be treated like enemy combatants.

“Those southern yahoos who claim Barack Obama is not an American president are right—he isn’t. He’s a front man for the Zio-Corp criminal empire, but at least he’s not a mindless idiot like the Romneybot.”

Reg: “Well, I still see the lunatic fringe coming unraveled and sparking an internal revolt, only this time it won’t be North vs. South; it’ll be fascist vs. democratic, whatever that will mean.”

Prof. Langston: “Let’s pick it up there next time.”

(The bell rings. All exeunt)