Retrospective

As we roll up 2014 like that rug in "How to Get Away With Murder," it might be useful -- if the people who need to pay attention were actually to pay attention which won't happen because, well, not paying attention is their thing, their raison d'etre, their way of pretending away being wrong all the time and where was I? -- to ask our self a simple and easily answerable question: were Rs right about anything? And having done so, we might also take a little time to wonder: will they ever be?

Ebola is going to kill us all; hiring a political operative to wade through the bureaucracies to coordinate our efforts was shameful. The Affordable Care Act will cause premiums to skyrocket, will tank the economy, will kill jobs, will be an utter failure. Putin is playing chess while Obama plays marbles (oh, that was a good one; and how our right-wing fawned over Mr Putin -- a real leader, the tough one, the one making Obama look like a fool. Every last one of our commie-hating freedom-loving wingnuts announcing to the world that their ideal leader is a dictator, a suppressor of human rights, of the press; an invader. Not that it was a surprise, based on observation over the past 14 years.) Would a current comparison of the two economies be useful? Did our much-reviled sanctions (why oh why didn't we kill someone?) turn out to be the failure predicted everywhere in our right-wing media? Did our non-militaristic response diminish us in eyes of the world? (How would we know?)

As the Dow reached the point of tripling since Obama took office, let's recall, shall we, the famous op-ed in the WSJ: "Obama's radicalism is killing the Dow." Nor, as we finish off yet another month in a record-breaking string of consecutive months of job growth, ought we forget that not a single R voted for the stimulus way back when. How 'bout we recall when they blamed President Obama for gas prices hitting all-time highs, as they regale us with their silence as prices hit the lowest level in many years? (For the record: given the many factors in oil prices that are out of the control of any president, I've never believed he had anything to do with either direction; although it's true that US oil and gas production has risen dramatically during his presidency. Which, speaking of Rs being wrong, isn't necessarily a good thing for those that believe in anthropogenic climate change.)

Anyone seen any ISIS folk around here? Are they running rampant over there, absent (very many) US boots on the ground? Has getting the locals to do their own work been an abject failure?

How many Benghazi investigations have proved any of the R claims of malfeasance, stand down orders, etc? Will the next one? (Will it be the ninth, reaching the same conclusion?) Has anyone paid attention to the just-released, R-majoritied report on the IRS non-scandal which found no White House involvement? Have Rs who favor torture been vindicated yet?

And what about those laboratories of Reaganomics, Wisconsin and Kansas? How are they doing, economically? Budget balancally? Jobsy?

One could go on like this for a long time, but I'm still in a cookie coma from yesterday. See? I'm not even providing my usual linkage. But it ought not even be necessary: everywhere we look, virtually everything we see in the way of Republican claims and predictions, for the year and for the entire Obama presidency, have been proven wrong. And not just a little wrong. Spectacularly, glaringly, surpassingly wrong. Wrong on all levels. Wrong here, wrong there, wrong in the morning, wrong in the evening, wrong at suppertime. Their wrongness rises to the level of of timelessness; it sets a standard to which no one else, other than they, forever, ought ever to aspire, much less believe they could achieve.

Which certainly explains the recent election results, and makes one highly optimistic for our future under their leadership, the first order of whose business, evidently, will be to politicize the CBO, fire its director, and install someone who'll buy into their preferred fuzzy math, to make it look like their economics are working when they aren't. 

Now that's how you deal with being wrong. Right?

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