Perspectives

My goodness! What if this had happened during the Reagan presidency? What if Jupiter wasn’t aligned with Mars? What if President Nancy hadn’t been running the nation off astrological charts? What if Reagan had ever offered a balanced federal budget or anything but voodoo economics? My gawd, what if Pluto transits your birth chart and you actually consider voting GOP?

In case you just fell off the turnip truck (think: Tea Party followers), there’s been an uproar over how Republicans select their candidates, determine government policy or decide which congressional Democrat seats are to be placed in gun crosshairs, er, excuse me, a surveyor’s map crosshairs. Yea baby! Yes, the astrological world has been turned upside down with the news that the heavens have been out of alignment. Oh, my. Now we know precisely why vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin could actually see Russia from her front porch!

This is serious business, kids. It is. It turns out that since the Reagan administration, Republicans have been making governmental decisions based on the wrong astrological charts. Horrors! It, like totally, explains the Iran-Contra fiasco, Bush 41’s “No New Taxes” faux pas, Bush 43’s disastrous and immoral invasion of Iraq, Republican budget-busting deficits and their devastating voodoo economic policies, well, the list just goes on and on.

Newly elected National Republican Party Chief Rince Priapus was quick to take up the challenge. “We’ve been operating totally blind for over 30 years,” observed Priapus, “we’ve waged ill-conceived, horrific wars, implemented disastrous, middle-class obliterating economic policies but with these new astrological charts and our fractious fun party of ‘no’ attitude, we’ll soon develop picture-perfect platitudes, illusions and obfuscations to totally regain political power from that illegitimate, non-American Obama!”

Former Republican Party Chairman and noted Mississippi cracker Haley Barbour was fast to employ “the stars were incorrectly aligned” justification to explain his recent foot-in-mouth gaff. Yes, Gov. Barbour was reminiscing about growing up in Yazoo City, waxing melancholy on those wonderfully bucolic days of yore when the cotton was high and the livin’ was easy — for white folk. Barbour said of the 1960s civil rights struggle, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” That bad!? Is that a stitch or what? Barbour offered his illuminating perspective with all the insight and wisdom of a privileged son of the ruling class.

But, fortunately for Barbour’s Republican presidential ambitions, he can now attribute his, uh, flawed caricature of a once pastoral South of generous whites and grateful blacks to those “misplaced” stars and ill aligned “heavens”.

Republican Party Chair Priapus said of the newly added astrological sign, “We Republicans have used deceit, smoke and mirrors, bait and switch, pseudoscience and daffy religious beliefs for so long to run America that it will be such a relief to once again develop special interest national policy with the certainty of a scientifically verifiable zodiac. It’s like creationism! Just think what Nancy Reagan might have accomplished during her administration if Jupiter had been properly aligned with Mars? Would ketchup ever have been designated a vegetable?”

The new sign, Ophiuchus, is symbolic of the newly energized Tea Party groundswell within the Republican Party. Appropriately enough, it is of a snake conveniently located deep inside the juncture of Orion’s Belt and Uranus. Indeed.