Imminent Demise

As today's Republican party divests itself of any trace of sanity, is it any exaggeration to say they'd rather usher in the end of the republic than compromise on anything? From the guy that just beat Dick Lugar, who was hardly a flaming liberal, but a senator occasionally able to see complexity, look for middle ground, if not go all the way to it:

"I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view," he said Wednesday on "Fox & Friends."

TeabaggR heroes, people of this sort, have neither any understanding of nor, other than as a campaign slogan, love for democracy. In what way is this not totalitarianism? How about the call for armed revolution if Obama is reelected? Does that sound like respect for the electoral process? (If you follow the link, you'll also be treated to the characterization of Obama as a "political socialist ideologue." The power of Fox "news" cannot be overstated, nor its willingness to deceive. Nor the ease with which it succeeds.)

The right, unabashedly, has adopted Orwell as its model (now that Ayn Rand has been outed): up is down, war is peace, lies are truth. And, as they see his facility with lying and rewriting history even as the blood of it hasn't yet dried, they'll rally around Rominee as they never thought possible. Anyone would have made the "easy" call to go after bin Laden, say Mitt and the RWS™. (Among the sayers is Donald Rumsfeld who, presented with much stronger evidence at Tora Bara and far less downside risk, feared and failed to give the okay.) Mitt claims credit for the auto bailout, as if his words at the time were never uttered. (Yes, he called for an orderly bankruptcy, but, showing his lack of understanding of the times and of how the economy works in crisis, insisted private investments be made, even though his former firm, like every single possible private-sector lender, refused to provide capital, leaving the US as the only viable source. So what was done was exactly what Rominee predicted would mark the end of the auto industry. But, see, it took me a few words to explain it: and teabaggers aren't much into sentences with that many meaningful words in them...)

As I watch it unfold, as we all are witness to the cynicism of the Republican efforts to deceive voters and to falsify the record, peddling lies about Obama, and as their befuddled followers show no sign of resisting it, let alone evidence of desire for truth, it's becoming clearer and clearer: in the unlikely event that Obama wins reelection, it'll only defer the inevitable. Because the right will never accept it, and they'll only redouble their efforts next time around, up the volume, lower the bar, say and do anything to get back their power, in complete disregard for the process, leaving integrity behind. Counting on haters and conspiracy theorists to add their votes to those of the deceived.

And here's the great irony: those who claim that if Obama is reelected we'll see the end of our democracy are exactly right. It's just that, having begun closing the lid decades ago when they hit upon the strategy of propagandizing and uneducating, they'll be the ones to pound the final nail.

Fool Me Once, Twice, Whatever You Want

Brief but depressing thought: isn't it amazing that Republicans, aided by their RWS™ deception machine, have yet again managed to make this election about abortion, same-sex marriage, and Christian paranoia. And, let us note, that was even before it began to appear that, despite their best efforts to prevent it, the economy is improving.

Just goes to show you: once you've got your audience thoroughly endumbed and sheepified by non-stop distortion and distraction, preying on their worst instincts and lying to them, you've got them forever.

When You Can't Run On Policy

You do this.

Sun Rises In East

Mitch McConnell, in a slip of the tongue (by which I mean he told the truth), makes clear what Congressional Republicans are all about:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Not, oh, y'know, balancing the budget, fixing health care, creating jobs. Addressing wars, improving education, solving immigration. Not that it was ever in doubt: they have zero interest in actually governing, nor ideas by which to do it.

And the RWS™ pretend it's Obama who hasn't been cooperating.

Why I'll Vote

It's typical election year stuff, but it happens to be true. More importantly, as President Obama said yesterday, Republican/teabagger tax plans threaten the death coup of our country. (He didn't put it quite like that.) With another $700 billion added to the deficit as the full continuation of all of the Bush tax cuts would do, we'd simply have no way to address our most central problems. Forget about infrastructure or climate change. Perhaps most disastrous of all, forget about addressing the steady decline in our education.

This, as the President did say, is not just about money. It's about our national security and our future. There's simply no way to get there if we follow the path of the fiscally irresponsible teabaggers and the selfish and cynical Republican leaders. It's simple math.

Which is the problem: a party that as policy rejects science, and as promised would substitute the Bible for the Constitution can't be expected to do even the most rudimentary calculations. Like, you know, arithmetic.

Logical

Something's wrong.

You have pains somewhere, or bleeding, or you're losing weight, peeing orange. Whatever. Constipation, diarrhea. Take your pick. So you see your doctor. She sends you to some specialist or other who collects some inadequate or irrelevant data, and, having interpreted it exactly wrong, makes a diagnosis. You see a surgeon, who concurs with the diagnosis, or maybe comes up with a new one based on a few more irrelevant tests. Anyway. So he takes you to the OR, and does the wrong operation, carries it out badly, ham-handed, crude. Probably doesn't even do the one he said he'd do. Sews your asshole to your ear. There are complications. You lose a leg, or an arm, can't speak anymore, or can't hear. You're in a wheelchair with stool draining out your belly button, you're breathing through a hole in your neck, you have to eat through a straw. Or a tube in your gut, or your subclavian vein. Your original doctor is horrified, and spells out in no uncertain terms exactly how the surgeon screwed up. It's outrageous, she says. Sue the sonofabitch. Call the cops.

What do you do?

Well, naturally, you recommend the surgeon to your friends, send him Christmas cards, and, next time you need an operation, probably to correct the problems he created, you head right back to him. Who wouldn't?

With the same unassailable reasoning, we're about to return to power representatives of the very party who made nothing but false moves, both when they were in the majority and put into place all the policies that have done us in, and more recently, when they were out of power, who railed at the plans to undo the problems they created, stonewalled them, and were unanimously wrong about everything they predicted over the efforts to fix things.

At a moment of crisis, conservatives made a series of predictions, assessments, and guarantees -- all of which turned out to be hopelessly backwards. Rewarding the confused [ed. note: confused? A misnomer if ever there was one.] only encourages more confusion, while punishing those who were right only encourages worse policymaking.

What to do? Reëlect 'em, hand them back the reins.

Makes sense to me.

Siege Mentality

One of the crazier of the R congresspeople (a comparative around which it's hard to get one's mind) says the US is "under siege" by terrorists.* Now, I'm no scholar but when I hear the word "siege" I think of a place, a village maybe, surrounded by enemies, communications cut off, running out of food, its survival in question. So I think the guy may be a little over the top.

Which is exactly where he and the rest of the RWS™ want us all to be.

Of course terrorism is real, and a threat. But to the extent that we are "under siege," it's a mentality created and nurtured by our disingenuous right wing. Fear is all they've got. And they'll use it without shame, secure in the knowledge that they have a full-time propaganda machine ready and more than willing to promote and distort to an audience too steeped in desire to be deluded to care.

To the average American, which is more likely to happen: personal bankruptcy from health care costs, or death at the hands of a terrorist? Defaulting on a mortgage, or capture by al Queda? In this plane of existence, what would be the sequence of events that could lead to radical Muslims -- even were they able to suitcase a nuke into a city -- taking over our country? And yet we've managed to let ourselves be shoved into reverse while heading forward, because of a few insane-cynical-desperate-powerstarved screamers.

It's not hard to understand: demagoguery has become the stock-in-trade of the current Republican leadership. Fear is their commodity of choice, it fills their booth in the marketplace. Right next to House O' Hatred. If they can find a phony cause, they'll whip it like a preacher in leather (or a senator in diapers). Because if people stopped being scared, where would the current so-called conservatives be?

Credit to President Obama for speaking out, when polls indicate 70% of the country disagrees with him. He knew he'd be pilloried, and he was. It's political bravery on his part. It's what America has always stood for; and it's a mark of shame for the country as it succumbs to the mongering and lies of the right wing. [Then he waffled a little.] [Of course it doesn't matter what he says. It will be demagogued. Which is the disappointing part: Obama still thinks there are people among the right-wing leadership who are open to reasonableness.]

What a pathetic bunch are the congressional Rs: like kids on Halloween, they're beside themselves with glee. The mosque will be a campaign issue across the country. And they won't even feel embarrassed at their lack of political importance. But, of course, it'll work. It's who we've become.

Frank Rich points out how the screamers at Fox "news" have betrayed General Petraeus and may have made their favorite war unwinnable.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

It's worth reading the whole piece (published days after I'd written most of this one), because it reveals the naked cynicism of the Fox crusade against the mosque. Hint: they were for it before they were against it. Non-surprise comment to teabaggers: you're being played. Again. And you'll never learn, because you don't want to. Also: you're really really ugly people.

And here's another very thoughtful and accurate statement, not at all unlike what I've been saying, by a US Senator from the state of my birth:

.... Some have also argued that the construction of the mosque would hand a propaganda victory to Osama bin Laden. I think the opposite is true. Al-Qaida justifies its murder by painting America as a nation at war with Islam. Celebrating our freedom of religion and Muslim Americans' place in our communities is a blow to al-Qaida's ideology of hate and division. We strengthen America by distinguishing, clearly and unequivocally, between our al-Qaida enemy and our Muslim neighbors.

.... Speaking at a mosque just six days after the World Trade Center attack, President Bush said, "These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that."

I have great respect for the sentiments of the survivors and family members of those who died on 9/11, and understand that some may not regard the situation this way. But our fundamental religious freedom and our national security -- in addition to fairness for our fellow citizens -- will be well served by drawing a bright line between our Muslim friends and neighbors at home, and our al-Qaida enemy abroad.

A mosque which isn't a mosque, at ground zero in a place not at ground zero, a dangerous guy who isn't dangerous (according to George Bush!) "An unnecessary provocation," Smiley Sarah called it. How ironic the words.

_______________________________

*I read it the other day, and damned if I can find it now. But it's true.

Unfair Fight

The deck is stacked.

In the political scene, such as it is, the thing that's depressed and disappointed me the most is the ease with which the RWS™ control "the message," and the ineptitude with which the Democrats deal with it. Here we are in the most uncommon era, with near-fatal calamities all around, and with only one party and its president trying -- and, to a large extent, succeeding -- to deal with them. Just look: the American auto industry -- saved; health care -- reformed for the first time in five decades; Wall Street -- first significant regulation in years; failing economy -- well, okay, at least they've tried. And it's pretty persuasive that absent the stimulus it'd be hell of a lot worse....

People can disagree about the efforts: health care -- too much reliance on insurers; auto industry -- should have let it fail, free markets being more important than jobs and recovery; stimulus -- too little or too much spending, too little tax relief or too much... But it's hard to disagree that efforts were made, and that successes have been seen. Or that Republicans decided early on that Obama's successes would be their undoing; and that if completely stopping him was impossible, convincing people that up is down was most certainly not. Cue the screamers.

To a huge number of people, it's been easily sold as socialism (it isn't), fascism (ludicrous), tearing away the very fabric of civilization. People have been led to believe that Obama has raised taxes on the middle class (he didn't), that the bank bailouts were on his watch (they weren't), that he closed auto dealerships based on political affiliations (totally debunked), and stuff way crazier than that (he's not Kenyan). Or, without so much as a clearing of the throat, the subject has been changed, to mosques and gays. Successfully. Look around: in the midst of actual problems, people are convinced they should be concerned -- they're enraged, I tell you -- about a non-mosque at non-ground zero. Brilliant.

Holding in their hands the fruits of the most productive Congress in ages, the Democrats are letting it spoil, helpless to turn the tide. What's wrong with them? With all the cards, they still can't convince people of the value of what they've done. What a pathetic lot.

Except, wait: they are up against an unprecedented and unbeatable force. There simply is -- and, because of the nature of the liberal mind, there never will be -- no machine on their side comparable to Fox "news" and the RWS™ of the airways. Dedicated without apology to the pushing of a right wing agenda (while continuing to call themselves fair and balanced!), willing to lie and distort to accomplish it, they blanket the public 25/8/366 with pure propaganda. So it doesn't matter what the President or Democratic officials say: it will be countered relentlessly with spin and distortion, stupidity and distraction. And their audience, cultivated and groomed for years, considers it "fair and balanced" or, even worse, prefers to have their prejudices and preconceptions reinforced rather than challenged or exposed as wrong. Ever since Ronald Reagan, right wingers continue to sell people on the idea that you can have everything and pay nothing.

It's an unfair fight that liberals can never win, because whereas there are indeed some shouty liberals on the airwaves, they generally refuse to spread overt lies: and liberals tend not to need or want to have constant reinforcement; at least not in the numbers corralled by the RWS™. Thus, the ratings. Thus, the impossible fight.

It hardly mitigates the frustration that Democrats are unable to get their accomplishments recognized -- much less debated on their merits. But I've come to accept that it's really not their fault. If Harry Reid were Demosthenes, if Nancy Pelosi were Angelina Jolie, if Robert Gibbs were Robert Welch, how could they counter a totalitarian right-wing network that has no scruples? By what means could they get through to a populace carefully groomed for the times: scared, angry, actively and proudly mis- and uninformed, whipped into a frenzy, equating education with treason?

We'll never know.

Lonely Voice

I've referred to him before, if obliquely, in my never-ending search for a reasonable conservative, an entity all but disappeared from the national scene, even as it's sorely needed. He, Ronald Reagan's former chief economic advisor, has spoken again:

.... In my own mind, I have the same political philosophy I've always had--basically libertarian but tempered by Burkean small-C conservatism. But I am no longer a member of the Republican Party and no longer consider myself part of the "conservative movement." That's not because I changed, but because I believe that they have. The Republican Party of today is not the party of Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan that I was once a member of; it stands for nothing except the pursuit of power as an end in itself, with no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country. In a recent interview with The Economist magazine, I characterized the Republicans as the greedy, sociopathic party. I stand by that.

I think Russell Kirk and Bill Buckley would be absolutely aghast at the things it stands for today and the people that are acclaimed as its leaders. When clowns like Glenn Beck are its leaders and right-wing bigots pander to ignorant yahoos about a planned mosque in lower Manhattan, I want to be as far away from any such movement as I possibly can. And readers of this blog know what I think of the know-nothing tea party movement, which conservatives have latched onto en masse.

What he says is self-evident, except to those who need to hear it most. "... no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country."

From the mouth of the ultimate Reaganite, one who sat at the right hand of God: "... no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country." Readers of this blog have read virtually those exact words before.

"... the greedy, sociopathic party."

"... stands for nothing except the pursuit of power as an end in itself..."

We need a strong conservative party. I'd pray for it if, well, you know... Our form of government is predicated upon discussion, dissent, argument. But it also presumes good faith and a sense of common purpose, namely a shared desire to find a way through the woods. Absent that, I suppose we could live -- tenuously -- if it were only the leaders of Republicans who refused to be thoughtful and to present credible ideas. But we can't live -- it's becoming more and more clear -- with voters in numbers that now exist, who gobble up the ghastly gruel they're being sold by Sarah and Glenn, by Mitch and John and Newt and Louie. Wholesale. In Costco quantities. Without so much as a final flicker, a terminal twitch, a rictus, a death rattle.

The Man Behind The Smear

As the RWS™ carry out their usual hatchet job, retracing the bloody footprints they left after destroying Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod, and many others less well known, it might be revelatory to get to know the victim of their latest attack, Donald Berwick, nominated to head Medicaid and Medicare. To them, he's evil incarnate. To the reader of his recent graduation speech at the medical school in which his daughter was among those graduating, a different man emerges.

.....Let me read to you an email I received on Thursday, December 19, 2009. It came from Mrs. Jocelyn Anne Gruzenski – she goes by “Jackie.” I did not know Jackie Gruzenski at the time; she wrote to me out of the blue. But I have since connected with her. And, she gave me permission to read her email to me to you. Here's what she wrote:

…

“My husband was Dr. William Paul Gruzenski, a psychiatrist for 39 years. He was admitted to (a hospital she names in Pennsylvania) after developing a cerebral bleed with a hypertensive crisis. My issue is that I was denied access to my husband except for very strict visiting, four times a day for 30 minutes, and that my husband was hospitalized behind a locked door. My husband and I were rarely separated except for work,” she wrote. “He wanted me present in the ICU, and he challenged the ICU nurse and MD saying, "She is not a visitor, she is my wife.‟

.....What might a husband and wife of 19 years, aware of the short time left together, wish to talk about – wish to do – in the last days? I don‟t know for Dr. and Mrs. Gruzenski. But, I do know for me. I would talk about our children. I would talk about the best trip we ever took together, and even argue, smiling, about whose idea it was. .... We would have so much to talk about. So much. The nurses would pad in and out of the hospital room, checking i.v.s and measuring pulses and planning their dinners and their weekends. And none of what the nurses and doctors did would matter to us at all; we wouldn‟t even notice them. We would know exactly who the visitors were – they, the doctors and the nurses. They, they would be the visitors in this tiny corner of our whole lives together – they, not us.

..... [T]oday you take a big step into power. With your white coat and your Latin, with your anatomy lessons and your stethoscope, you enter today a life of new and vast privilege ..... [S]ociety will give you access and rights that it gives to no one else. Society will allow you to hear secrets from frightened human beings that they are too scared to tell anyone else. Society will permit you to use drugs and instruments that can do great harm as well as great good, and that in the hands of others would be weapons. Society will give you special titles and spaces of privilege, as if you were priests. Society will let you build walls and write rules.

......... But, now I will tell you a secret – a mystery. Those who suffer need you to be something more than a doctor; they need you to be a healer. And, to become a healer, you must do something even more difficult than putting your white coat on. You must take your white coat off. You must recover, embrace, and treasure the memory of your shared, frail humanity – of the dignity in each and every soul. When you take off that white coat in the sacred presence of those for whom you will care – in the sacred presence of people just like you – when you take off that white coat, and, tower not over them, but join those you serve, you become a healer in a world of fear and fragmentation, an “aching” world, as your Chaplain put it this morning, that has never needed healing more.

Congratulations.

Read the whole speech, then tell me: is he the devil the screamers say he is?

If, as I said recently, the worst thing the right-wingers have done to our country and our world is the killing of climate legislation, then the runner-up is their characterization of health care reform as "death panels" and "genocide" (as a group of Larouche supporters, complete with Obama-as-nazi signs, claimed a couple of days ago, parading near my local post office). In the latest of uncountable examples, these people, the screamers, the radio guys, the talking headless of Fox "news", Congressional Rs, teabaggers who've dipped and drunk deep, who have no desire or ability to enter the marketplace of ideas, would rather don the vestments of hate and hyperbole, and blow themselves up like al Queda in a farmers' market, taking down as many innocents as possible. What, I wonder, do they expect to see when they find their imaginary paradise?

More importantly: why do so many people buy into the lies, rally around cynical people who treat them like idiot sheep? Using scare tactics and buzzwords like "rationing," taking reality-based remarks out of context while advocating tax cuts for the rich and unspecified spending cuts, how has it been so easy to convince so many, with so much evidence to the contrary, that they're on the right side of the argument?

Simple; and I've said it again and again: we've become a nation of selfish and stupid people, too lazy to think for themselves, unwilling to do the hard work of living in a democracy. Giving lip service to "patriotism" while in fact espousing the very ideas that have brought us down, as a way to justify their selfishness, which is exactly what it is: selfishness. Wrapped in the Shroud of Turin.

The right wing has recognized it, stoked it, counted on it, and is ready, once again, to take the money and run.

Pathetic

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but in every election in the past who-knows-how-many years, Republicans have campaigned on hate and fear, usually in that order. Lately they've had a little problem with their go-to pistol-whipping of gays, as a semblance of humanity has glimmered its way to the mid-brain of enough former cretins to be making a difference. Gay marriage? Ho hum. (Well, not exactly. But it no longer brings the blood to the eye that it once did, when it helped elect George Bush.)

With no ideas that have any traction, none that haven't already been shown to be devastating to our economy, where's the fallback this cycle? On whose back to dump the hate, to rally the frothers, to win the power once again to steal the piggy bank? What's a good Rovian Republican to do?

......

Wow. That was easy. 9/11 and Muslims. Nine years, and it still works. Even most American-made cars can't claim that kind of reliability.

In a happy bit of timing, a couple of days after I started this post, Sam Seder, who is way funnier and cleverer than I, came out with another in his series of "That's Bullshit" videos.

What a pathetic bunch are the current Republican leaders. How cynical, hateful, useless. How sad that their style works as well as it does, on people who ought to know better. Assuming, of course, they believed in education, tolerance, and America.

It's getting to be too much.

As Opposed To Governing

Count on it. If Rs take back either or both houses of Congress, government will grind to a halt. Because of people like Michelle Bachmann and Darryl Issa, among others. For a party with no ideas, it's twoly perfect: lots of face time in the media, and no need actually to do anything.

“Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” Bachmann said. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on..."

Making it clearer and clearer, Congressional Rs keep telling us the obvious: they have no intention of governing, and couldn't care less what will happen to our country. And yet, on the backs of people like this, it appears they'll be carried back to power. How sad for us all. What a historic opportunity, wasted.

And Congressional Rs aren't the only ones with fabulous plans.

These are actual people.

Race To The Bottom

Disappointed that their racism claims blew up in a blue flame of edited tape, the RWS™ still want to discredit Shirley Sherrod. Surely Shirley should shrink, shrieking, from shoring her shtature after they invested so much egregious energy into the effort. So what's a bunch of evil idiots to do?

Well, of course, call upon American Spectator, that rag of the right, to up the ante, to double down on dumb. She's a liar they say, because she described a murder as a lynching when no rope was involved. Seriously. That's their argument.

This is beyond derangement. Absent any useful ideas, terrified of having to defend the ideas they do have (returning to Bush/Reagan in all things), they want to hide the ball. Distract. Shiny objects. The narrative on which they seem to have glommed is that that black guy in the white house hates white people in the blackest reaches of his black heart. And damned if they'll retreat from it, whatever the facts. The soil is out there, that much is obvious. All they need is to keep tilling it with bullshit.

Play To The Dumb

It's no longer news, sadly, but it's still remarkable that we have in this country a major political party that is premised on presenting no ideas, and whose success depends on the stupidity of voters, which it overtly encourages, and to which it directly plays.

...the public continues to struggle in identifying political figures, foreign leaders and even knowing facts about key government policies. Only about a third of Americans (34%) know that the government’s bailout of banks and financial institutions was enacted under the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly say that the Troubled Asset Relief Program – widely known as TARP – was signed into law by President Obama.

I'd venture a guess that if it were broken down by political affiliation, we'd find way more than half of teabaggers believing Obama was the originator of TARP and the bank bailouts. We know for sure that they don't understand where by far most of the national debt, over which they're so outraged, comes from.

And so, relentlessly, Republican leaders and their RWS™ and Fox "news" keep playing to the dumb, reinforcing the misconceptions. In that way, they have to propose nothing on their own. They're getting confident enough in the gullibility of their voters that they're even admitting it. As policy: keep our mouths shut.

Can we really be that vacuous as a country? A mere two years after Republican fiscal policy was shown, undeniably, to be the voodoo economics that GHWB once called it; within a couple of years of the beginning of the bailouts; while the steam is still rising from the effluent of unregulated excess, people have no understanding of what happened, what was done to try to fix it, and why? None, seemingly. Can it really be that enough people have forgotten -- or never knew -- so much so quickly that they're ready to return to the same policies that got it all started?

You know, it's one thing to criticize the dearth of job creation, or to have reservations about specifics of health care reform, or about the Wall Street regulations, or whatever. But to think that people simply don't know or understand what happened, and that they're so easily subject to mongering of fear and being fed disinformation that they're willing to put back in power the same people who brought the destruction, who not only have no new ideas but who want to go back to doing the same damn things.... it's just unimaginable. And yet, there it is.

At some point -- or so you'd think -- people would wake up to the fact that they're being played, that their putative leaders consider them stupid, feed them b.s. on the assumption that they'll never figure it out. Or care. But for that to happen, they'd have to be.... not stupid. And Democrats would, finally, have to figure out how to teach.

Well (if a little strenuously) Said

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I don't watch Olbermann any more, because unlike Foxophiles I don't need constant reinforcement of a narrow point of view, and I finally got turned off by his over-the-top self-righteousness and his tendency (as opposed to Rachel Maddow, whom I also stopped watching but highly admire for her actual journalism) to have only yes-men on his show. Which is not to say I disagree with him.

The above is exactly what I've been saying about Fox "news" and the RWS™ and all of those like Blue (I exclude Frank because I think he's huffing his hoses so much he doesn't know what he just said at any given moment and as a liberal I must empathize and hope he gets help) and teabaggers and the silent sea of softheaded seekers of solace from cerebration who enable them by defending them or simply ignoring the obvious: they're liars. All of them. Every single one. Deliberate liars. They're inimical to functioning democracy. They've taken the idea of journalism and perverted it, intentionally. Knowing the value of a vigorous and free press (protected by the Constitution the ignoring of which they supported for the prior eight years), they've chosen to destroy it by discredit. It's like those programs to control mosquitoes by releasing sterile ones into the population. I can't speak for the mosquitoes, but this plan is working well.

I'll say it again: if you heard it on Fox "news" or from any of the RWS™, it's a lie. It's a deliberate falsification based on a destructive agenda and it's predicated on the belief -- for which there remains no disproof -- that its listeners and supporters are too stupid or too needy or too lazy or too uneducated or too hidebound by their preconceptions to figure it out. And, of course, on the knowledge that among those who do figure it out, most won't care. Will, in fact, love it for that very reason.

Democracy depends on an educated electorate. Education depends on good public schools and a functioning, intelligent, well-intentioned and skeptical press. And so, systematically, brilliantly, cynically, the right wing has been amputating every leg of the stool. And they've been doing it for a single simple purpose: fool the rest of you so they can take the money and run.

Give me another explanation, and I'll consider it.

Data For Deniers

The above graphic is from an article whose title tells it like it is:

Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years

Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers

From the article:

The events and policies that have pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were initiated during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.

Also, because it's a credible and balanced article:

While President Obama inherited a dismal fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s long-term deficit problem. But we should not mistake the causes of our predicament.

Among the titles of other paragraphs in the article:

Financial Rescues, Stimulus Add to Deficits in Near Term

And:

Bush Tax Cuts, War Costs Do Lasting Harm to Budget Outlook

Another article makes mostly the same point, if a bit skeptically:

The dire outlook from CBO today is not the fault of the current administration or any one administration (LBJ may be the most to blame I guess for starting Medicare). In fact, if the Medicare cuts in the health care bill are to be believed and CBO's estimates pertaining to the health care bill are to be believed, Pres. Obama has already done more to reduce in magnitude the long-term budget problems for the U.S. than the previous administration, who undoubtedly made the problem worse. That's true despite the amount added to the deficit from the stimulus bill and the costly coverage provisions in the health care bill. The obvious question is whether or not you believe the large cuts to Medicare will ever pan out. If not, Obama's fiscal record thus far is about as bad as the previous administration's.

Yet, in their usual disingenuous (at best) and cynically dishonest (for sure) or deliberately destructive (in reality) manner, the RWS™ remain in force and on message, claiming that the merest suggestion that GWBush has the tiniest shred of connection to our perilous situation is politics of the worst (if not unfamiliar to them) kind.

I repeat myself, some might say. But isn't this what it's all about, politically, for the next several months, in the US? In hopes of getting back into power, the robbers return to the scene of the crime claiming they're innocent. This is a willful disinformation campaign by Congressional Rs, the RWS™, and Fox "news," aimed at distracting the disturbed and deceived from the truth: that their policies and their most recent president have left us damaged -- possibly beyond repair. Knowing their faithful and faith-needy and hugely uninformed and formlessly angry and base base will take it in like high-fructose corn syrup, they continue to dish it out and provide the spoons. Common sense and simple facts be damned: there are teacups to be filled, and teabaggers most eager to drink.

Perfect Example

It should be clear to everyone by now that Congressional Republicans, the RWS™, and everyone at Fox "news" would rather see President Obama fail than see our country succeed. It's as overt as an oil spill. The best thing that could happen, in their eyes, would be for the country to fall into another recession. (Well, that, or the nuking of a city by al Queda.) So here's how it goes:

Among economists there is some disagreement about the size and scope of the recovery act (with at least two Nobel winners saying it was too small); but almost none think it was unnecessary. Deficits, though not particularly desirable, are an unavoidable consequence. For now. And only the most hard-core deniers argue that the stimulus hasn't been of benefit. So what's a right-winger to do? Inheriting the worse economic calamity since The Depression, promising to reverse it, and succeeding, Obama has put the Republicans, whose policies drove us off the cliff, in a bit of a bind.

Easy. Rail about the deficits. Whip their easily-whipped, frightened, and uninformed teabagging minions into a frenzy; send the talking points to Fox "news," see to it that their cadre of echoing RWS™, who have nothing in mind but their ratings and their next dose of oxycontin-lithium, will pump up the volume. And presto, as darker night follows night: in a perfect meld of the credulous and the cruel, the paranoid and the pseudopatriot, the disingenuous and the disturbed, you're on the way to wrecking the economy -- AGAIN -- in order to win elections.

It's not hard to imagine the meetings in the unprepped bowels of the Congressional Republican hiding places. "Deficits," they announce. "It's all we've got." A plan forms: call Dick Armey and get him to roll out his astroturf, put it under the feet of his teabaggers. Deficits, deficits: play them like a vuvuzela, get Hannity on the phone, leave a message for Beck in his tinfoil closet. And be sure, for god's sake, not to mention that ninety percent of the deficit going forward is from Bush's tax cuts and spending increases; don't ever refer to the things Obama has already done to lower deficits; and, whatever you do, don't let anyone talk about the impact of more recession on our economic future. Deficits, just deficits. It's simple, it's perfect for people for whom bumper stickers have replaced newspapers. It'll work.

It is working.

"If Congress doesn't provide additional stimulus spending, economists inside and outside the administration warn that the nation risks a prolonged period of high unemployment or, more frightening, a descent back into recession. But a competing threat -- the exploding federal budget deficit -- seems to be resonating more powerfully in Congress and among voters."

"Seems to be," all right. And why is that? See above. Egged on by people for whom national interest is the furthest thing from their minds, people have come to prefer economic calamity over short-term deficit spending. Rightfully, Obama has pledged to address deficits when the time is right. Wrongfully, with only their return to political power in mind, the selfish have convinced the short-sighted that the time is now.

You sort of have to tip your hat to the brilliance: all it takes is a surpassingly cynical (if accurate) view of voters and willingness to lie to them unendingly, to deceive them without a second thought. In Twenty-First Century America, if a party untethers itself from love of anything but its own power, nothing is impossible.

Those Damned Facts

Among the commenters who used to troll here but seem, mostly, to have left when they found the stuff they spout doesn't float in deep waters, a favorite comment is that I should stop blaming Bush for our problems. Forget facts, they would have us. Rely on simple and wrong, they prefer to. Ignore information such as the above chart, they do.

Which, of course, is exactly what Congressional Rs and their mouth organ are assuming the public will do as well. That they're probably right doesn't change the central truth; it just reinforces the reality of our collective stupidity and preference for easy answers, misplaced blame, and magical thinking. In times such as these, which demand our best, teabaggers and those of similar disposition toward angry but devoid certitude are the unfortunate -- yet apparently inevitable, given the milieu -- response.

In my practice I was called upon on a (mercifully) few occasions to try to undo the damage done to a patient by a previous surgeon. Picking up the pieces left by another (especially when the patient had had the opportunity to come to me in the first place and have things done right) is by far the most unpleasant and undesirable situation I -- or any surgeon, or any physician at all -- ever encountered. Depending on the extremity of the situation, it can be deeply and irreparably no-win. And yet, there the patient is, in need; and there you are, needed. Among other unpleasantries, it's nearly certain that, no matter the outcome (because it's likely the patient will never be as well-off as if the first operation(s) had been done properly), you know you'll be among those to whom blame is assigned: sued, in other words.

Since an operation is never as easy or more likely to go well than when it's done the first time, there will almost certainly be technically daunting challenges. There may be no good choices; your options might be only among those least likely to be disastrous. Faced -- as I have been -- with distorted anatomy, pockets of pus everywhere, unrecognizable structures, all in a patient depleted of physical and psychological reserve, you may have no other course but to embark on something very hazardous, with countless opportunities for complications, or outright failure. To use the proper medical phrase, from the time of Hippocrates: it really really really sucks.

I don't see much difference, except in orders of magnitude, between those professional experiences, and the assuming of office after George Bush screwed up a (possibly necessary) war; took us into and screwed up a clearly unnecessary and ill-advised (in several meanings of the term) second war; set the economy toward ruin with his tax cuts and steadfast refusal to pay for his wars; ignored our energy crisis and, in fact, made it worse by reversing the meager steps that had been taken before him; increased the Republican assault on science and reason; it goes on and on. It was not without an easily recalled sense of my own fears and trepidation in context of my care of previously-damaged humans that I wondered, during the recent election process, why ANYONE would want to assume the presidency. Anyone with serious ideas and a sense of the magnitude of the problems, that is, which excludes most of the R candidates and, most certainly, their eventual nominees.

It's in this same context that I'm inclined to temper my disappointments with Barack Obama. He's been far from perfect, in my view: not enough focus on jobs; health care possibly ill-timed and too complex, too much based on insurance companies; too slow on DADT; too quick to compromise with or cave to disingenuous criticism from the right. But at least he's trying, with serious intent, facing unprecedented challenges. FDR, after all, faced The Great Depression and WWII more or less single file, and it was only one war, with a couple identifiable and locatable enemies; there was no energy crisis, no oil polluting from a mile under the ocean; no coordinated 24/7 disinformation network annealed with talk radio and the length and breadth of the opposition party to poison the well with deliberate lies; and there wasn't a public unable to face adversity and unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good; a public willfully misinformed and actively engaged in remaining that way.

Which still doesn't explain why the hell Barack Hussein Obama wanted to take it on. I wouldn't have. He's a much better man than I, and he still can't do it.

Which tells you something.

Need More Proof?

Could it be any clearer that Congressional Republicans 1) aren't serious about governing and 2) are enemies of science and education? For that matter, isn't it also obvious that Congressional rules are so arcane and bogged down that our country simply can't function as a political entity?

The problem, I think, is that when the rules were made there was an assumption that the minority party, no matter which one it was, would retain a scintilla of decency, and a glimmer of commitment to country above party. Using the phrase heard commonly of late to excuse the most egregious of errors (9/11, oil spills, Iraq insurgency, derivatives crisis...), "no one could have foreseen" the disastrous alignment of a theocratic party, a news organization committed to promoting it, the capitulation of the rest of the media, and the willingness of the electorate to be tagged and teabagged by them. There was even a time, I think, when such a grievous failing would have been understandable. In the barely recalled past, parties talked to one another, and a common desire to do right was assumed, even during disagreement. No more. We have only one serious political party, and, given the way Congress works and the devolution of the public sensibility, that's not a good thing. Our system was built in and depends on good faith.

Here's the latest example of Republican indecency. There was a House bill aimed at raising funding for scientific research and for math and science education. You know, the stuff that might save the future for us... It had passed out of committee and was ready for floor vote. But some Republican congressman -- a Texan, no less -- had a way to stop it. (Science?? My god, what will those Nazi Democrats do next?) It's complicated and simple. Evidently, you can demand a bill get sent back to committee by a "motion to recommit" which he attached to an amendment requiring that money not be spent in salary to anyone found to have watched pornography. So Democrats had two choices: deny the motion to recommit, thereby risk being campaigned against with the claim they'd voted in favor of pornography, or pull the bill off the floor. Brave souls that they are (well, realists, too: sure as hell the claim would have been made and the public would have undipped their bags long enough to drink it in), they pulled the bill.

Now, I have no doubt that there was much high-fivin' going on in Republican cloakrooms; I'm certain the if-Obama-is-for-it-we're-against-it crowd thinks their boys in Congress are cool as hell. But science? Really? (Well, of course. Nowadays, their whole foundation is denialism.)

And thus we see the seriousness, the patriotism, the respectability of our opposition party; the party that wants control again after taking us up too and well over the brink, the party Fox "news" is all about promoting 24/7, the party the teabaggers just love to death. The party that, despite its failings and because of its willingness to distort, dissemble, and deceive, is quite likely to regain power faster than I'd have thought possible.

But that was when I still had residual faith in the electorate and (I can't remember why) hope that the media were up to their responsibilities.

We are so screwed.

Mind Control

I guess you could call it mind control, were minds involved on the receiving end.

Nevertheless, it goes well beyond amazing that the Republican party and its RWS™ and, downhill from the privy, its teabaggers, have, without the slightest hesitation or shame, turned to one guy, one cynical and very rich, very successful, brilliant even, propagandist extraordinaire, to put words into their mouths which they then, without a second thought, parrot and repeat, in unison, regardless of truth -- because it's untruthful -- robotically, unceasingly, willingly, unblinkingly, knowing as surely as the big lie always has, that it'll eventually become, in the minds (were thinking involved) of enough people, some perverse and zombified if unrecognizable version of truth, if by "truth," we accept the RWS™ meaning: namely, lie. Whew. Excellent sentence, if I may say so.

Frank Lunz gave us "government takeover" for the health care debate, when government takeover was (is) the last thing the bill was (is.) But to the teabaggers, it became and remains truth of Kenyan proportions. And now, to prevent the inarguably needed regulation of the Wall Street version of banking, he's given us "bailout" as a way of defeating legislation aimed, among other things, at ending the need for bailouts. Even as the ink dried, Mitch McConnell picked it up like a kid finding a shiny quarter on a dirty street and ran off with it, jowls jiggling, eyes blinking. In unison, his fellow lobotomates slavered their simultaneous sycophancy. None, not a one, cared to point out that the "bailout" fund was paid for by banks, to prevent tax money from being so used again. And when the offer came to remove the provision, it had no effect on their opposition, despite their claim that it had been their main objection. Their words are popcorn: empty puffery, dissolving in their mouths even before they are spoken.

Never mind that McConnell's mouthing of Luntz immediately followed a meeting with Wall Street bankers. Such overt pandering and craven disregard for the needs of the country no longer bothers him or any of his breed. Never mind that the lie is too much even for Mark Halperin (that link is worth a click). Certain of his echo chamber and the credulity given it, Mitch finds no need to hide his deception; not even the pretense, in his view, matters any more. You're dumb enough to buy it, he says to the baggers.

I must say, though, that even to a cynic like me it's pretty astounding that the beholden nature of Congressional Republicans to Wall Street and its money, and their patent unconcern for anyone not supremely wealthy is so undeniable, yet so unimportant to the teabaggers. I guess when you live downhill from that privy for long enough, shit starts to smell like team spirit, and crap tastes like chicken.

So here's the deal, teabaggers. Mitch McConnell, Frank Lunz, Fox "news" and the rest of the RWS™ don't actually care about you, except as votes. Tax cuts? The only ones important to them are the ones for the richest of the rich. Balanced budgets? Which Republican administration has ever had them? A talking point for the benefit of the credulous. Remember "deficits don't matter?" Trickle down economics? Did it work? (At least Obama isn't claiming his deficits -- and those inherited from Bush -- aren't serious; and he's doing something about them.) Wall Street reform? Last thing on their minds, other than as a hook in your mouths. Those bankers are their real constituents; those guys are them. Is there any doubt?

The fact is, teabaggers, the aforementioned Rs, their propaganda organ known as Fox "news", their word smiths and their screamers, all think you're stupid and gullible, susceptible to the most elementary of manipulations: words. They're treating you like it without so much as a twinge of doubt or compunction. So far, you haven't proved them wrong.

There's still time to wake up.

But not much.