This Is It

Well, you'd think it would be, anyway. Up until now, Congressional Rs have tried to hide the extent to which they love big business, and particularly big oil, above the interests of the American people. They'd couch it in terms like "free markets" and "the American way" and they'd expect -- because it was true -- that they could get enough people to be distracted by it. Prestidigitation, is what it is.

So when they drop all pretense, figuring the teabaggers will vote for them instead of that black communist America-hater (true), and knowing that Fox "news" and all the RWS™ would claim Obama is the anti-Christ even if he were to turn IEDs into gold and give a bar to every US citizen (they would), in a rational world (it isn't) some might expect there'd be a backlash. Some might think they'd finally overplayed their hand, become so sure of themselves that they no longer felt the need to hide their real agenda or to package their crap and sell it as chocolate sauce.

The reaction to the twenty-billion dollar escrow fund for paying damages caused by the oil spill has been amazing to me; and I no longer amaze very easily. Nearly in unison, the Republicans in Congress have characterized it as extortion, as a slush fund, as something awful. (Rush Limbaugh thinks the money might go to Acorn.) The very idea that a president somehow managed to get a company to pay for the damage it caused has sent them to their fainting couches. Michele Bachmann thinks when a company pays for damage it's "redistribution of wealth." (What business transaction isn't, Michele?) Joe Barton (who has received more money from oil companies than any other Representative in Congress, and who would become chairman of the energy committee were Rs to gain the majority) apologized to BP and said he doesn't "want to live in a country" where "every time" someone does something wrong he or it is expected to make it right. Really. That's what he said. Yeah, sure, he sort of apologized for calling it a "shakedown." But that's the very term Bachmann used, as did the "Republican Study Committee," which includes over half the House Rs. And some guy who wants to be a Republican congressman thinks the government deliberately caused the leak.

So. Is it what they believe, or, as has been the case with so much else, are they willing to say anything, to ignore whatever opposite they may have said previously, in order to take a shot at Obama? Either way, isn't the spectacle of kissing the ass of oil enough finally to wake up the millions who've been deceived by these people and their propaganda outlet known as Fox "news"? At last, might this outrage at something so simple and obvious as insisting on accountability be a point of tipping?

I've watched the statements of these apologists for the despicable behavior of BP in disbelief. How can they be so arrogant, so brazen? Do they have it on some authority that their supporters are so in the teabag for them -- are so stupid in their rage against, well, whatever it is that they're raging against -- that they're actually against everything, EVERYTHING, that Obama does? Even when it's so clearly right?

I guess so. I guess so. Having watched those people, in their unfocused and uninformed anger, their visceral hatred and unabashed sense of aggrieved entitlement, I guess so. I keep thinking that no political group -- not even teabaggers and those that agree with them -- can be that stupid, that gullible, that easily deceived. I keep thinking that at some point something -- something -- those obviously unserious Congressional Republicans say or do will be rejected. Those people who don't believe in accountability or regulation, not even after all this. But I guess not.

I guess not.