Those were the days, huh?   Wasn’t it great when Bush’s overconfident and doomed quest to privatize Social Security summarily collapsed as his wars already had, and, along with his revolting and pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina, his incompetence and stupidity basically handed the House to the Democrats in 2006, and later the Presidency along with it?   You could be forgiven for thinking that such a massive electoral repudiation of a party and its bonkers, demonstrably failed ideas would lead to something, well, different.  That is, if you lived in a different country, or had amnesia.  Times have changed.   You see, a lot of Very Serious People in Washington have decided that actual people voting, expressing opinions, and all that is an woefully outdated way of running the country, and have thus chosen a course that nobody really wants, but yet seems to be our destiny.  Disenfranchisement is the new, if you’ll pardon the pun, black.  And young.  And poor.  And elderly.   Quelle surprise.

A vocal, if not physically very attractive or numerous, bunch of people who ardently hold a lot of slickly marketed but nonetheless certifiably retarded ideas are now responsible for a lot of halfwits and cuckoo people currently holding elected offices in America, thanks to the same Supreme Court that put 2000 loser George W. Bush in office.  It’s nice work if you can get it, really; have your dad put some toadies on the court, get in there, and put a couple of even worse toadies in there, and, Wa La….  You get Citizens (!) United, and after that, voting Democratic, unless it’s for, say, Blanche Lincoln, becomes either illegal or irrelevant (or both).  If you listen to the Liberal (!) Media, you’ll endlessly hear that “both sides are equally at fault,” but does anyone who doesn’t wear a bib to dinner still believe such utter horseshit?

If Commies and Muslims really are getting ready to take over, and the whole future of the country really does depend on throwing some more virgins into the confidence fairies’ volcano, there’s a chance we could be doing the right thing here.  Vanishingly slight, but still there.  More likely, the Republican-sodden media and a tiny and purposefully ill-informed minority will win the day, just like in every economic battle over the last thirty years, and Overton’s window will have moved so far to the right that Pat Buchanan will have a seemingly permanent spot on MSNBC.  Oops.  Never mind.

No deficit “Grand Bargain,” (would such a thing be even necessary or desirable at the moment) that wouldn’t make things immeasurably worse is even “on the table,” in one of Washington’s more contemptible phrases.  There’ll be sacrifice, all right, but don’t count on it being “shared.”  And don’t count on it being the last, either.

PS….  Happy Birthday to my stinky brother, Turd, who will be the same age as me until next week.

As soon as the returns came in, he typed the following:

Without doubt the Tea Party will be rejoicing at the midterm results and laying down ultimatums to the Republican Party to steer to the right, and the Republican Party, having embraced the Tea party, will be hard pressed to say “no” to the new right wing in America.

It seems Penn thinks the Republican Party has a habit of saying “no” to righty nutcases, something I personally have not witnessed.

Poll after poll shows that the Tea Party is really a splinter of the Republican Party, and the exit polls show that this was a vote about the economy, not ideology. Only 23 percent of the voters said that they were casting a vote for the Tea Party while 56 percent said it was not a factor and the rest outright opposed them.

But 62 percent of the voters said that the economy was the key factor determining their vote. The polls show that the voters want tax cuts not tax increases, modification or repeal of health care, spending cuts and above all jobs.

Of course, a clear plurality of those polled have consistently wanted health care reform retained, and many of those who don’t like it think it was too weak.  Additionally, no polls show that Americans are keen on the tax cuts for the richest, which is what Republicans are fighting for, and the Republican record of job creation is abysmal and always has been.  The imaginary “spending cuts” that voters are supposedly clamoring for have yet to be revealed, natch.

With health care reform, cap and trade bills, and tax increases, President Obama got out of step with the voters. Why he didn’t just kick the Bush tax cuts down the road a year and get them out of the election cycle is mystifying. Instead — just like in 1994 — the Democrats ran on the platform of increasing taxes for the wealthy, amplifying class warfare rather than ending it.

Class war will continue as long as there is a non-rich person who isn’t starving, as has been amply demonstrated over the last decade.  Failure to tax the wealthy quite demonstrably costs everyone else money, bankrupts the country, and worse, it gives the supperich the resources to buy elections, like they did this one.  Excess money at the top, and not enough everywhere else, caused the recession, and the chances that more of the same will cure it are akin to those of a snowball in hell.

Whoever told President Obama “don’t worry, just pass health care and they will love it” must be squirming in his seat tonight. And all those who think that tacking further to the left is the answer for the Democrats should look at these results carefully and think again.

That would have been Rahm Emanuel, who prevented even the faintest “tacks to the left” from the get-go, but this pompous fatass thinks it’s ME who should look at things “carefully.”

President Obama and the Democrats lost many of the new constituencies they had won in 2008 — they lost independents by 15 percent in the CNN exit poll. Obama had won them by 8 points. They lost seniors by 16 points, doubling the loss from 8 points while seniors turned out in droves. And they lost voters in households making over $100,000 by 16 points; compared to an even split in 2008, that is evidence of the damage of the reinvigorated class warfare strategy. These are all battleground voting blocs that Obama had done well enough with to trounce McCain.

Notice he doesn’t mention that turnout affected these statistics; that’s why he also didn’t mention young voters, whom Republicans have driven away permanently with their bombastic moralizing, and the fastest growing group, Latinos, who have recoiled at the racism of the Republican Party, probably saving Harry Reid.  Penn then waltzes clumsily around this:

And the two other core constituencies of President Obama — young voters and minorities — stayed home, with their percentage of the vote dropping dramatically. In the end the Republicans and the Tea Party won the turnout war and those differences are also a major factor in the outcome. 41 percent of the voters were conservative, up from 34 percent in the 2008 presidential election. Only 11 percent of the voters were aged 18 to 29, compared to 18 percent in the presidential election.

Clearly, this last part completely destroys the premise of Penn’s “argument,” which is that somehow if Obama had behaved more like a Republican, these groups would have raced to the polls.  What is the likelihood of that?  Ditto for gays, peaceniks, the unemployed…  you name it.  Obama lost these voters because he was too much like a Republican, end of story.  But not for Penn…

These results are just plain facts, and the president needs to stand up and take notice. The voters are rejecting the current course and have thrown up a major roadblock to his policies.

Facts?  Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from shady, right-wing money-launderers, Republicans launched a campaign to drive down turnout among those not rich and/or old, and it worked, thanks to Citizens (!) United and a credulous media that pocketed the ad money while trumpeting the juggernaut to come for over a year.  This isn’t rocket science, but they evidently don’t teach that at Harvard Law, as President Obama’s pathetic press conference this morning makes abundantly clear; he swallowed Penn’s claptrap hook, line, and sinker, and maybe when Darrel Issa’s committee files articles of impeachment, he’ll catch on.  Then again, maybe not.  Penn continues, painfully:

But this does not mean that the voters want to gut Medicare, Medicaid, Education or the Environment. They don’t want the government shut down; they want it fully open for business. Above all, they want jobs, and they are willing to vote for any party they believe may have the answer to the economy. Nancy Pelosi became the poster child of the left and became the target of the Republican right. They scored a bulls eye on her, but all glory is fleeting. The burden will be on the Republicans now to be a responsible handbrake — if they again shut down the government they will lose the public’s trust and support very quickly.

If Penn had a brain, he would have known that Republicans plan to do all those things, and more, because like Obama, he sees a pony under every steaming pile.

If President Obama wants to serve a second term, he will have to heed the call to recalibrate his administration. He was elected as a centrist. They want him to be one. He was elected as a youthful, vigorous candidate who would lead us into a more global future. They want him to do just that. He was elected to end, not amplify partisanship. President Clinton turned his White House around from a similar defeat in 1994. President Obama faces the same choices and opportunities to remain true to democratic values and yet set a new direction to turn all this around.

Of course, the fact that Obama’s bland centrism was immediately treated as Commie/Nazi/Muslim/Usurper outrages by everyone on the right seems to have escaped Penn as he munched on his Doubledowns, and his supposed youthful vigor was what led people to believe he wouldn’t be little more than an articulate George Bush, which is what he turned out to be.    How, exactly, could Obama have governed even more from the mythical “center?”  David Broder thinks bombing Iran might help.  Good luck with that, and listening to the likes of Mark Penn.

(CHNN is still tabulating results from our elections predictions, but I’ll post scores tomorrow…)

More scarily, right here in the Northwest we may elect Chris Dudley, who has received NO major newspaper endorsements, and despite being 6’11,” couldn’t make a free throw in his salad days as a Trailblazer, as our next Governor.  Dudley ran his entire campaign according to the Sarah Palin doctrine: avoid the media and never say anything specific about anything.  Add money and stir.  And he’s currently neck and neck with two-term former Governor John Kitzhaber, in deep blue Oregon.  I’m cautiously optimistic, but it’s still possible that we will have a Bushian closet-teabagger leading our state in January.  (Official CHNN prediction: Kitzhaber by a hair…)  Up north, perrenial sore loser Senate/Governor candidate Dino Rossi, perhaps because Washingtonians like the Flintstones, might defeat two-term Democratic incumbent Patty Murray in a contest that seems too close to call, and could be the race that either deprives or awards the Republicans with Senate control.  (CHNN prediction: race not decided on election night because of slow count, but Rossi will lose again, and throw another tantrum about it, like he did last time….)

Now that I’m on a roll (and my second cocktail), why not throw caution to the wind?  Kirk will beat Giannoulias in Illinois; Toomey will beat Sestak in a squeaker in Pennsylvania, and Angle will narrowly best the pathetic Harry Reid in Nevada.  All but Kirk will prove to be horrible embarrassments to their states and not be reelected, damaging Republicans as they storm Washington, babbling incoherently.  In Alaska, the vagaries of her write-in candidacy will leave Lisa Murkowski battered, but perhaps victorious against Democrat Scott McAdams and demonstrably cuckoo person Joe Miller.  Either way, Sarah Palin loses, which gladdens my heart, but I want McAdams to win so badly (I have supported his campaign, natch…) that I won’t jinx him by giving him CHNN’s nod prematurely.

Dishearteningly, the law and order brigades of the prison-industrial complex may yet defeat Proposition 19 in California, which would finally legalize marijuana, thanks in part to the lameness and cowardice of the Obama Administration and Democrats in as a group.  (Indeed, every progressive defeat can pretty much be seen in that dispiriting, if unsurprising, context now…)  In California, Boxer will soundly defeat Fiorina, and Jerry Brown will easily defeat Meg Whitman, and though I’m in favor of more cocktailhags in government generally, I won’t be crying in my gin for those two spoiled, undeserving harridans.  They’ll have to shop sales now, having blown their riches making Californians despise them.  I like that.

Overall, I think Democrats will retain the Senate, but only by one or two seats, and lose the House by a similar margin; like Retzilian, I simply cannot believe that voters are so stupid as to deliver the kind of sweeping victory Republicans have been crowing about for at least a year.  Unlike the media, I take into account the accuracy of all their other predictions over the past decade.

If I’ve left out a seat anybody considers important (and there are many…), it’s only because my crystal ball is just too foggy at the moment.  I dream of 1998, when despite months of unanimous media babbling to the contrary, Republicans got their rather substantial asses handed to them; but I fear 1994, when Republicans launched a similar temper tantrum, and it worked for them (at least until 1996).  Either way, I’ll be drinking early.  I welcome any prognostications y’all might have in comments, and invite you too look back at Retzilian’s from two posts ago, which are considerably more daring (and less gloomy) than mine.

There will be a prize for the most accurate soothsayer, and to placate Steven Rockford, it will be a fur or jewel, just not very fancy ones…..  Voting will remain open until 5:00 pm Pacific time, when I’ll still be sober enough to do math.  Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and just make a guess.

Trouble is, they’ve already tried that, ad nauseam.  Fear-mongering via deceptive advertising (augmented, ruthlessly, by Fox et al…) does seem to work, at least for a while, but then what?  Absurd and extravagantly financed horseshit does move voters, at least at first, but after a few months, they do inevitably get sick of it, and this movement, intrinsically, has no plan B.  Will more ads save Meg Whitman in California, so many months after the “Demon Sheep” fiasco?  What about Linda McMahon, who isn’t sure what the minimum wage is, but is nonetheless certain it’s too high…  will more of her own millions save her?  Our local clueless, anti-minimum wage richie, Oregon gubernatorial candidate and lousy basketball player Chris Dudley managed not to earn a single major newspaper endorsement in the whole state, despite the millions of dollars spent so far that created an early lead, and is now sinking in the polls.  While liberal elitists like myself may decry the stupidity of the average voter, we are well acquainted with their annoyance at repetitive garbage pumped into their living rooms, and thus take hope at this juncture.

The media, as you’d expect from the eager beneficiaries of the Money Bomb, emphatically discount the notion that voters even care who’s paying to deceive them, but better late than never, Democrats including President Obama have finally caught on to the impact on the ground that mega-million campaigns create in the electorate: mainly skepticism about who, in this beleaguered economy, can afford to bombard them with such factually challenged nonsense, and more importantly, why?  In California, the money spent by out-of-state oil interests to “postpone” that state’s landmark carbon-reduction law was so abusively saturating that even Enron-backed Republican Governor Arnold Schwarznegger felt comfortable calling the sponsors out, publicly, for their “oil-black hearts,”  and the ridiculous reefer madness hyperbole spilled by the drug warrior guard against Proposition 19 has the historically apathetic youth vote ready to turn out in droves, dashing Republicans’ overconfident hopes there.

It’s too soon to say whether, on balance, the “Permanent Republican Majority” envisioned by George Bush, Karl Rove, and the rest of them, predicated on getting enough fanatical right-wingers on the Supreme Court to pass such a blatant Democracy-ender as Citizens (!) United was a success or failure for the political movement that dreamed it up, but it is soon enough to say one thing:  Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy love.

Cocktailhag–

See? We’re on a first-name basis, and he doesn’t even bother with salutations.

I come into this election with clear eyes.

Yes, but it’s the rose-colored glasses you’ve been wearing for two years that makes it such potential debacle.

I am proud of all we have achieved together, but I am mindful of all that remains to be done.

I know some out there are frustrated by the pace of our progress. I want you to know I’m frustrated, too.

Some?  Try everybody.  And, unlike you, none of us are the frigging PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, so we can’t do anything about it, like you could if only you weren’t such a sellout weinie.

But with so much riding on the outcome of this election, I need everyone to get in this game.

Why?  It’s not my job; it’s yours.  To bad you didn’t think about this sooner.

Neither one of us is here because we thought it would be easy. Making change is hard. It’s what we’ve said from the beginning. And we’ve got the lumps to show for it.

Yes, lumps of your own making, and deservedly so.  And how do you know change is hard?  You’ve never tried it.

The fight this fall is as critical as any this movement has taken on together. And if we are serious about change, we need to fight as hard as we ever have.

Could you cut it out with the “we?”  As I previously mentioned, you’re the President, and I have a job, too, doing something else.

The very special interests who have stood in the way of change at every turn want to put their conservative allies in control of Congress. And they’re doing it with the help of billionaires and corporate special interests underwriting shadowy campaign ads.

If they succeed, they will not stop at making our work more difficult — they will do their best to undo what you and I fought so hard to achieve.

And this comes as a surprise to you?  You thought that cozying up to Wall Street, the oil companies, big Pharma, and on and on, would make those types love you, and eliminate the need to fight them?  If you were in fact born yesterday, you should have mentioned that in the campaign.  Had you, not me, “fought” for anything worth having, you wouldn’t need to be begging me for support now.  Please make a note of it.

There is no better time for you to start fighting back — a fellow grassroots supporter has promised to match, dollar for dollar, whatever you can chip in today.

What’s two times zero?

Please donate $15 — and see who wants you to re-commit to this movement.

I don’t want to meet any more dumb people, but thanks.

I know that sometimes it feels like we’ve come a long way from the hope and excitement of the inauguration, with its “Hope” posters and historic crowds on the National Mall.

I will never forget it. But it was never why we picked up this fight.

Maybe you should let it go.  I have.

I didn’t run for president because I wanted to do what would make me popular. And you didn’t help elect me so I could read the polls and calculate how to keep myself in office.

Well, in that case, you’ve been a roaring success.  Why, pray, did you run, then?  Not to end the wars.  Not to rein in corporate interests.  Not restore the tattered balance between “security” and American ideals. Not to help immigrants and gay people attain full citizenship.  This better be good.

You and I are in this because we believe in a simple idea — that each and every one of us, working together, has the power to move this country forward. We believed that this was the moment to solve the challenges that the country had ignored for far too long.

That’s all?  Even by that evanescent standard, how, exactly, have we “moved forward?”  What log-neglected challenges have we solved?  Bupkis, that’s what.

That change happens only from the bottom up. That change happens only because of you.

For the last time, YOU’RE THE PRESIDENT!!!!   And all the “change” I’ve seen came from, as usual, the other direction.

So I need you to fight for it over the next 26 days. I need your time. I need your commitment. And I need your help to get your friends and neighbors involved.

Good luck with that.

If you bring in a new donor today, your $15 donation will become $30. And our Vote 2010 campaign will have twice the resources to make important investments like putting staff on the ground, providing materials for volunteers, and turning out millions of voters come Election Day.

Nope.  I gave to the candidates I support (which, not coincidentally, aren’t usually the ones you support), and I plan to vote Democrat.  But that’s it.  Bad service, no tip.

Please donate $15 — and renew your commitment today:

Don’t wait up.

https://donate.barackobama.com/OctoberMatch

If we meet this test — if you, like me, believe that change is not a spectator sport — we will not just win this election. In the years that come, we can realize the change we are seeking — and reclaim the American dream for this generation.

I had something sooner in mind, to tell you the truth. Just to be clear I don’t believe “change” is a spectator sport, but if it were, the stands would be empty when you’re on the field.

Thank you for being a part of it,

It?  What’s “it?”  I claim no involvement.

President Barack Obama

Honestly.  I hate to have to knock the President so, but it’s pretty galling that he has such a muscular and tireless fundraising arm, and such a pathetically weak political arm.  If Democrats maintain control of congress, which I think is increasingly likely, it will be in spite of, rather than due to, any effort on his part.  Better yet, the biggest defeats will be the Blue Dogs, corporate slimeballs like Blanche Lincoln et al, that the Obama Administration alienated their base by supporting, and judging by that letter, I don’t think President Obama will learn anything from this.  He seems to have figured out that people will put up with him, lame as he is, because they have no choice.

Like old age, the Democrats are only good compared to the alternative.   At least that’s something, but it isn’t worth paying for.  Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. President.

Interestingly, the “pragmatic” acceptance of right-wing policies as one’s own is accompanied by an adoption of the right-wing sales tactics that went with them, since, well, what else is there?  Liberals, nominal or otherwise, have never had to practice pitching such horrors; generally, in the old days, we lamented them.  But as far as setting up straw men, misdirecting anger, and victim-blaming, we really ought to return to our core competencies and leave that field to the right, if the astonishingly unconvincing crap I’m reading is any indication.  No, Kossack, Firedoglake’s candid and accurate assessment of the “enthusiasm gap” isn’t “stupid,” but rather a wake-up call to a compromised and languishing party whose craven leaders somehow thought couldn’t lose, even if it fucked up royally, which it did.  And no, No More Mister, Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher aren’t “Firebaggers,” when they criticize Bush-grade Democratic sellouts to corporations; they’re literate.  It makes a difference.

Now, the Obamabots are marveling at the mojo our Leader showed when he belatedly and inadequately fired up and, although with undue politeness, actually called out Republicans for the reprehensible behavior they’ve been exhibiting since before he was sworn in, which back then might have been a good idea, but now, after his serial capitulations, seems to all concerned to be the empty political gesture it clearly is.  Bush may have relied on media appearances rather than reality on many occasions to bolster his image, but he did deliver, for his particular slice of the electorate, on the bread and circuses part, too, that is if tax cuts are your bread and war is your circus…   Obama, for all his vaunted smarts, still doesn’t get this, and is going to pay dearly at the polls for it, deservedly.

Sadly, there is no group more likely to reinforce the meme that the reason for the Democrats’ utter failure to make use of their two-election mandate was Obama’s undetectable, but nevertheless disqualifying, “leftism,” than the Obamabots.  Each time they join Mitch McConnell and Dick Armey in decrying the “moonbats” within their own ranks, another Fox host gets her highlights, or maybe boob job.  Inevitable Democratic losses in November can be interpreted by the media in several ways: 1) They were due to a bad economy and Republican intransigence, which is only partly true but at least less damaging to the liberal cause over time; or 2) They were due to Obama’s capitulation to the right that caused his policies to fail and made him look like a vacillating, principle-free wimp; or 3) America is a center-right nation and only Republican-approved policies are ever acceptable, no matter how crazy and no matter how Americans vote.  This bunch, which calls itself liberal, seems to be gunning for #3, and they’re calling me stupid.  Sheesh.

Like many of the other publicly disaffected Democrats subject to serial, rote abuse from the left (ish) thought police, I would never dream of not voting in November, nor, I imagine, would any of the rest of us hippies White House spokesman Robert Gibbs thinks are in need of a drug test: no election is without consequences, and we’ll drag our pot and patchouli-scented selves to the voting booth regardless.  My question is…  Who else do you expect to do so?

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.