Behold:

I’m with Gibbs.

At times I’ve found White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to be unnecessarily irascible, and maybe his lashing out at the constant grumbling of the “professional left” wasn’t the best tactic. You want the base worked up — but for you, not about you.

When Republicans fire up the base with little theatre like wars and stuff, that’s playing the Village Game well; when Democrats try to offer, well, superior policy initiatives that are also good politics, that’s not playing fair.

Nonetheless, his basic point was spot on: The complainers from the left are, in some combination, myopic, forgetful and deranged.

Yeah, like when we said the Bush tax cuts would bankrupt the government, the Iraq War was illegal and would prove disastrous, and all that.  Being right is always the hallmark of derangement to those who were, and continue to be, wrong.

Gibbs is far from the only White House official with these frustrations, but he’s the first to share them on the record and, therefore, the first to walk them back. He issued a statement longer than the original offending words acknowledging that he may have spoken “inartfully” — which is Washington-speak for honestly — and confessing to watching “too much cable.”

Part of being a Villager is admiringly critiquing one another’s lies for their impact and effectiveness.  Gibbs obviously passed this exacting test with flying colors, in the world according to Ruthie.

That last part may be true. As to the rest of it — Gibbs was right the first time.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs told The Hill’s Sam Youngman, in an interview published Tuesday. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

This “professional left,” he added, “will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Indeed, for all the derision from the left about the Bush administration not being “reality-based,” many lefty bloggers and talking heads have failed to be reality-based in assessing the Obama administration.

Health-care reform, in this glass-half-empty world, is a disappointment because it lacks a public option. The president’s failure to close Guantanamo or end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is a betrayal. If only President Obama was willing to bang heads, name names, stand tough, he would have been able to get — fill in the blank — a bigger stimulus, tougher financial reform, new legislation to help unions organize.

So, by choosing a whole plethora of demonstrably failed policies and failing to choose the higher, more defensible ground on all of them, Obama has lost his base by shabby compromise, and everyone else by the flat-out failure that resulted, and this is somehow the fault of those he didn’t listen to in the first place.   Earth to Ruth Marcus:  The Republicans lost, deservedly.  Obama won.  There’s a difference. 

Excuse me, but can these people not count to 60? Have they somehow failed to notice that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have not exactly been playing nice? That while the left laments Obama’s minor deviations from party orthodoxy, the right has been portraying him, with some success, as an out-of-control socialist?

And they get away with it because of just this sort of right-coddling “journalism” from such rags as yours never call out the lies.  As a journalist, it’s your fault, Ruth, that people are so misinformed.  Obama has not made “minor deviations from Party orthodoxy,” he has caved in every area that mattered, from the wars to reining in Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and on and on, and the predictable outcomes of such cravenness are now ruining Democrats’ chances in the fall.  Because they are bad policy, whatever the politics.

Apparently not. Responding to Gibbs, Jane Hamsher, of the blog Firedoglake, derided Obama’s record of “corporatist capitulation” and noted, “Spiro Agnew — sorry, Robert Gibbs — says ‘the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.’ Well, the Obama in the White House is not representative of the Obama who organized, campaigned, raised money and ran for office, so I guess it’s a wash.”

All true, which naturally gets Ruth’s dander up, so she goes for the weakest part.  (The main difference between Agnew and Gibbs is that Agnew attacked the opposition, a distinction lost on Ruth.)

Spiro Agnew? Gibbs is going to have to work on his alliterative skills to come up with anything as memorable as nattering nabobs of negativism. Carping cavilers of cyberspace?

She doesn’t know what alliteration means, either.  Quelle surprise.

That the left would fall out of love with Obama was entirely predictable. “After eight years without the White House, and two years in which a Democratic majority in Congress found itself stymied in delivering on its promises, the leftward precincts of his party are not inclined toward either compromise or patience,” I wrote just after the election.

Oh, and the Righties are, you genius?  (Note how she grandly quotes herself as a paragon of prescient profundity…  Oops, I alliterated, correctly.. don’t tell Ruth.) Funny, but I don’t recall Bush having any “Sister Souljah” moments with his base, ever.  He gave them their every wish, sometimes reluctantly, no matter how demented.  Somehow it’s only Democrats who mustn’t bow to their “crazies.”

What surprises me, though — and, no doubt, what set off Gibbs — is the venom of the liberal critics, even in the face of the sustained attack on Obama from the right and a legislative record longer and more impressive than I would have guessed back then.

As a Villager in good standing, you naturally predict Republican triumphs and Democratic failures, and retardedly equate Republican lies (Obama is a communist!) with Democratic facts (Bush is a stupid warmonger!), so it’s understandable that you’re wrong again.  Too bad no one will tell you.  But just to put a cherry on the BS sundae, why don’t you finish with some Old Media Elitism, and drive a few more subscribers to flee in disgust from your withering fishwrap?

In the old days of press-bashing, it was sound advice not to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. The Gibbs backlash shows how foolhardy it is to argue with people who don’t even have to buy ink.

How much ink did that little missive waste?  Ruth, get a job.

Outside of Wolf Blitzer’s pathetic show, Liz Cheney’s McCarthy Palooza against the Obama DOJ isn’t going quite as planned, despite the enthusiastic boost it received from the LA Times.  Numerous prominent conservatives have branded Cheney’s insultingly ignorant fear-mongering as reminiscent of or worse than McCarthy, and even Condi Rice called the campaign, “unfortunate.”  When you’ve lost Condi Rice, you’ve lost America, Liz. I always thought it was odd that any credence and or airtime would be given to A) the unqualified daughter of the most despised politician in America, and B) the dumbest and most often wrong Neocon flak of that same dark and repudiated era, but the US media is an odd place, where no show is too unpopular to take on the road, once again.

Fortunately for Kristol and Cheney, but unfortunately for the party they think they’re boosting,  only FOX-addled Americans and overpaid media gasbags sit around worrying about terrorism anymore…  the rest of the country has its own problems, which have the advantage of being real.  The fact that they’re playing the terror card this early simply shows that they don’t have anything else, which is pretty foolhardy, since most Americans realize that Obama is as far to the right as any President could go on terror without getting hauled into the Hague.  Worse than that, these cynical, fear-based campaigns remind Americans of the worst aspects of Bush’s disastrous Presidency, something any smart Republican ought to be running from as fast as they can.

But they aren’t, of course.  A party which offers nothing but war abroad and police-state repression at home can only sell itself through fear, and as the recently released RNC PowerPoint starkly revealed, that’s what they’re going to do.  Of course, since Cheney and Kristol are more interested in papering over their shameful pasts than they are in getting Republicans elected in the future, they’re peddling the same fears from the glory days of 2002-2004, striking a dissonant note when the new, improved fears are supposed to be about creeping socialism and whatnot.  Micael Steele ought to tell Cheney to shut up, but he obviously doesn’t know what that means.

If the Republicans think, seriously, that such tired, discredited strategies will do anything but play right into the hands of the feckless Democrats who, having few good alternatives either, have already picked the Bush years as their opponent in 2010, they will remain in the minority for a long time.  The Bush years were not just about ruinous economic policies, reckless spending, and corruption at all levels, but more importantly they were about a manipulative and sleazy method of governing by fear, smear, and innuendo.  And while the former have remained stubbornly unchanged, America is happy to be free of the latter.

Liz Cheney utterly fails to recognize this, and after having successfully harangued the DOJ into making public the names of the perfectly mainstream lawyers she vilely called the “Al Qeada Seven,” is still beating her dead horse:

Cheney, for her part, shows no signs of relenting. Hours after her organization was able to browbeat the DoJ into releasing the names of the seven officials who previously represented detainees, it put out a statement demanding even more disclosure.

“We regret that they still refuse to tell the American people whether any of these lawyers are currently working on detainee issues inside the Department,” said Aaron Harison, the executive director of Keep America Safe. “The American people have a right to know whether lawyers who voluntarily flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of the terrorists are currently working on detainee issues in President Obama’s Justice Department.”

“Flocked to Guantanamo to take up the cause of terrorists?” Really?  How dumb and blindly hateful does Liz Cheney think we are?  Americans fell for fear in 2002 and 2004, and, unlike the media, remember what it got them.  They also remember that almost all of it was unmitigated horshshit, much of it coming from someone named Cheney.  Liz should be glad she didn’t inherit her father’s looks, but sadly, she did get his personality, and that’s good news for Democrats.

UPDATE: Mistakes were made, apparently, at CNN:

On Friday, Blitzer apologized for the graphic and called DOJ lawyers “patriotic.”

“CNN had no intention of suggesting that the Justice Department supports terrorism. Lawyers at the Justice Department are patriotic Americans and we certainly regret any confusion that may have been caused by our graphic.”

Not by his insultingly ridiculous reporting, natch, but it’s something.

As I pointed out yesterday, the things the righties promise have all been done, ad nauseam, and proven repeatedly to be astoundingly stupid and ruinous, but still they tout them as though they were the best things since Vitameatavegamin.  Unless all of their candidates are as yummy as Scott and Sarah, a bunch of Reagan retread ideas, even perfumed with some fresh xenophobia and racism, isn’t exactly going to go over, even with the teabaggers.  The glorious and momentarily uplifting wars, after all these years, have proven to be a big, fat, waste, and worse, they aren’t even good for ratings anymore.  They’ve gotten boring.  If the righties don’t offer something, anything, to their voters except belt-tightening, wars, and tax cuts for the rich, they might even get beaten, by the Democrats, no less.

I wish Democrats understood this.  They wouldn’t have to run by demonizing Republicans if they did anything useful, but since they don’t, oughtn’t they demonize the Republicans, night and day?  After all, they’ve had ample opportunity to see that this strategy works quite well for the Republicans against them.   Alas, no.  Instead, they parrot righty memes and adopt the righty policies the memes support, and throw the game in the first inning. Perhaps the reason the gasbags admire the Republicans so is because if politics is reduced to the sports-like blather to which they routinely consign it, the righties are better players, despite their doughy appearance, and the Democrats are the last ones you’d want on your team.

For a time, they were right, too, as the Bush Administration “Let the Eagle Soar,” as it were.  But the relentless predictions of Republican resurgence the media has touted since 2005 hasn’t occurred yet, and none of its new heroes has ever exactly done anything unpopular.  Yet.  But they will soon, when they cravenly scuttle banking reform and wage pointless battles about extending the Bush tax cuts, bleat for more wars and environmental destruction, and start trying to slash “entitlements,” while the rich they fight for so ruthlessly have meanwhile become almost the only people who eat regularly in the country which they are always threatening to leave.  (see Knight, Phil…)

Call me crazy, but as lame as whatever it is the Dems are going to offer, it won’t be nearly as bad as what the righties come up with, and that problem will assuredly surface as we head into the fall, although it will come as a total surprise to David Gregory.  Even, and perhaps especially, in Televisionland you need to have a product to sell, and the Republicans don’t have it.  They have Liz Cheney and Glenn Beck’s chalkboards, and it goes downhill from there.  Good luck with that.

The Democrats deserve to lose, but I just don’t think the Republicans are going to let them.

You see, to the permanent beltway elite, what politicians actually do once elected is irrelevant, for which reason they studiously never bother to find out what that might be.  All that matters is how the spin and flim-flam are playing in their imagined Peoria of the polls, nudging befuddled voters this way and that, since everyone knows that nothing will change, no matter how the little people cast their votes, if they even bother.  In the mirrors into which they constantly gaze, all this democracy business is nothing but a game, theater of the absurd put on because, well, surely no politician cares any more about his fellow Americans than does, say, David Gregory or Joe Lieberman, but TV News is still big business, and they can’t just run a test pattern and be done with it.

The “consensus,” which like all others, is as unanimous as it is absurd, floats above reality; since politics to them is both nothing and everything, a cardboard simulacrum to lull the rabble into thinking they matter when they don’t, motives must be conjured out of thin air to explain the fickle nature of the great unwashed.  Poll results are cited that show that Democrats are unmotivated and Republicans are writhing in fervor, and such tea leaves are read to mean Obama is pushing the country “too far to the left.” This is something Bush was never accused of as he pushed the country further to the right than ever imagined, and a patent absurdity that nonetheless leads the powdered and pampered denizens of the green room to declare, natch, that people like them must never be taxed to pay for the wars they champion, the lower orders must be in need of more suffering, and not enough brown people abroad and at home are being tortured, killed or tossed onto the streets.  Their guests, whether CEO’s, religious charlatans, racists, or war profiteers, not unexpectedly nod eagerly in agreement.

Of course, no one ever explores the glaringly obvious reasons for such shifts in public opinion since 2006, namely, that the Democrats have systematically abandoned every principle they ever held since at least 1900, and the Republicans have co-opted the media and relentlessly assaulted the lately defeated right with unadulterated fiction for thirty years, creating one party whose voters actually expect results, and another whose addled followers can be satisfied by whatever spews out of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh all the way to the bread lines, even when no bread is offered.  President Kennedy once fretted that, at some point, personal comfort and prosperity would drive a Democrat in the hands of the Republicans,  Democrats have since ably fixed that annoying problem by impoverishing everyone equally, so no one has a reason to be a Democrat in the first place.

Now, Democrats have come up with a neat idea for 2010, really the only one left after summarily tossing out the New Deal coalition of unions, minorities, educated people, and the poor that carried them for nearly a century, and it’s as pathetic as it is revealing: At Least We’re Not Bush.  Though they’ve embraced his militarism, his coddling of the superrich, his disdain for labor, and indifference if not hostility to gays and other minorities, they really don’t have anything else concrete to offer, so it’s worth a try, I guess.

Harry Truman, who was lucky enough to have a political career before the advent of Fox News and the infection it caused within the elite media, probably put it best, “when people are given a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who acts like one, they’ll choose the Republican every time.”  Today, those are the only choices.  Good luck, Democrats.