It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

A more than usually horrifying video has cropped up (above), and as hard as you might find this to believe, it has right-wingers knickers in a twist.  Not about the pissing, naturally, but about that anyone would dare to find it unseemly.  Behold:

Of course, since we’ve dedicated more than a decade now to the undeniably worthy cause of killin’ Habibs for Jesus, such events are no longer surprising, either for their sadistic homoeroticism, nor their utter disdain for the humanity of others.  The sort of violent, eliminationist rhetoric that was mischievously concocted by cynics who clearly knew better, just to sell their ridiculous wars, has “trickled down,” if you’ll pardon the pun, a little too well.  As the tweeter (and wingnut welfare queen) above illustrates, we now believe that everyone America’s bloodthirsty military murders is a terrorist, and figuratively, if not literally, ought to be pissed on. Even if they’re obviously unarmed and appear to have been pushing a wheelbarrow at the time of their deaths.

Well, if that ain’t keeping America safe, I don’t know what is. I had grave reservations when Bush decided we would drop out of the International Criminal Court, and forever abandon the “good guy” image that helped us win WWII and later become the heroes of Nuremburg, but in my worst nightmares I never thought it would come to this. Thanks a lot, Fox, Limbaugh, Savage, et al; now somebody will need to “apologize for America.” But early indications show you won’t be among them.

First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

Really.  Is it news anymore when President Obama morphs into a smarter and more polished Bush, and the media eat it up?  Admittedly, he chooses his sets and costumes more understatedly, and avoids the sort of mangled and often unwittingly inflammatory scripts that eventually made Bush the most hated President in decades, at home and abroad, but the message, and certainly the outcomes, haven’t changed a bit.  As Glenn Greenwald and many others have tirelessly pointed out, in many ways on matters that are always called “National Security,” but are really merely covers for the militarization of America, Obama is every bit as bad as Bush, and often worse when it comes to toleration of dissent (from anyone who doesn’t happen to be a Joint Chief, that is…).  Obama’s acquiescence to these policies, given that he ran against not a few of them, was bad enough, but his later gleeful embrace of them as he headed into what he obviously thought would be a cakewalk reelection, has put him off his game.

On matters large and small, Obama has cast aside the concerns of “The Professional Left” for so long that even a purely theatrical gesture like this one comes as something of a gift at this point, and a tacit admission that the most rabid chickenhawks can be crossed for once is certainly welcome, but is it enough?  The plain fact is that Obama’s worst failures that endanger his reelection all have to do with his constantly surrendering to and thereby legitimizing the worst and stupidest of Republican policies from the Bush years.  Bad policies do, in the end, make bad politics, and Obama is reaping the whirlwind, deservedly, for failing to repudiate them each day.

Had he chosen to look both backward and forward involving the myriad crimes of his predecessors, many of today’s loudest and most strident critics would be in jail.  Had he chosen to prosecute the banksters, same thing, with the added benefit that all Americans, even teabaggers, would have benefitted substantially.  Had he forthrightly and openly backed Medicare for all, he might not have gotten shellacked in 2010.  But worst of all, out of either foolishness or cynicism, he inexplicably adopted the ridiculous rhetoric about the Federal Budget being just like the Family Budget, and therefore couldn’t buy just any old thing in tough times, and the public bought it.   Sadly, for him and the Military Industrial Complex he so ably leads, what the long-suffering public decided it didn’t want to buy anymore was more wars.

Since he can’t run on the economy, healthcare, civil rights, choice, or what have you, he has decided, rather oddly, to run on Peace, and fear of the Republicans.  I suppose it’s better than nothing, but is it really any different, with 70,000 troops still there for at least two years, than Dick Cheney saying, “So what,” albeit  a bit more delicately?  I don’t think so.

Well, it seems that those danged Libyans are perhaps already the next grateful recipients of America’s Love Bombs, as we’ve brusquely pushed aside the momentarily dominant cheese-eating surrender monkeys themselves, the French, within a few hours, to “take the lead” in the latest attack on perennial enemy of all that is white and gas-guzzling, the dreaded BPWO, or Brown People With Oil.  That is, the US military, led by Constitutional Law Professor Barack Obama, has once again abruptly noticed some transgression or other that we routinely commit ourselves, and used that excuse to have the US military go in and make sure the oil stays in the right hands while they tend, as it were, to the  faux “humanitarian” crisis.  Bombs are, as you’d expect, involved.  Yee haw.

Doesn’t this stuff ever get old?  I mean, old in the sense of the two other wars we’re busily and expensively losing that everyone suddenly seems to have forgotten?   Unlike new consumer products that have lost their charm and are thus headed unmourned for the landfill, wars never go away these days; they just accumulate, like the plastic Texas (or Rhode Island, depending) size island floating somewhere in the Pacific.  Meanwhile lives are ended and/or shattered, terrorism gains new fuel, resources are irretrievably wasted, and a once-great society descends into ham-fisted, penny-pinching oligarchy for no apparent gain, outside of a few already large fortunes increased.  Oil always prices keep going the same way, generally at an even faster rate.  Mission Accomplished?

At least in the earlier wars, a little more effort, and certainly much more time, was put into making people feel good about sacrificing their future to enter, prosecute, and some conveniently distant day, make the middle class and poor pay for the glory of it all.  Contentious UN votes and speeches created some semblance of popular involvement in such a drastic choice, and large peace rallies were held, all to little practical, but at least some comfortingly symbolic, effect.  This time though, they didn’t even bother.  We’re just once again at war, and why and for how long is really none of our business, and even on Al Jazeera, where I got the news, nobody questioned this.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have repeatedly noted, war is just another of the many major public policy decisions that have been, informally during the Bush years, but increasingly aggressively during the tragically misnamed era of Hope and Change in which we now live, simply removed from the realm of things about which ordinary Americans have any say.  Tax policy, always favoring the rich and well connected, are just as sacrosanct as programs that actually benefit anyone are suspect; indeed the very concept of what government really is has been utterly lost as the monster that has replaced it just rumbles along despite wide disapproval from its citizens.  At one time not all that long ago, it was still possible to believe that a single person’s vote could make a difference…  Later, in 2008, it briefly seemed that at least a whole lot of people’s vote could.  But as we roll into 2012, we find, maybe with pained resignation, that no matter what the voters think, government has already long since chosen its course, and if we don’t like it, we can pound sand.

Austerity at home, and bombing abroad, year ten.

UPDATE: Well, I of course had to go to AlJazeera again to see it, but in an otherwise smarmy, dismissive and infuriatingly unenlightening presser with some Pentagon flack named William Gortney, I found out not only that a bunch of things in the “battle space” had been “flattened,” but that one of our dizzyingly numerous missiles now being deployed is called, “The Growler.”

One way out of the mess surrounding the Jan. 27 arrest in Lahore of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, say senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, is a Muslim ritual for resolving disputes known as “blood money.”

Murder, despite its obvious charms, can sometimes be a “mess,” and Ignatius is ready to send in a servant with a mop and bucket, stat.  Clearly, he has spent a lot of time on the toilet reading Pamela Geller’s literature on the subject, and is delighted to have found a neat way to turn those sneaky Habib’s barbaric code of honor on its head, while not coincidentally helping to salvage the vanished credibility of warmongering halfwits like himself.  The keyboard brigadier continues, warming to his little idea like a hooker to Fleet Week:

This approach would require a prominent Islamic intermediary – perhaps from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates – who would invite relatives of the two men Davis killed to the Gulf. Payment to the victims’ families could then be negotiated quietly. Once the next of kin had agreed to this settlement, the legal case against Davis for murder might be moot in a Pakistani court.

No mention of the third Pakistani killed by Davis’ reckless escape driving from the scene of the double murder, nor the subsequent suicide of the fiance of one of the initial shooting, but in Ignatius’ world, the US government operates a busy pay window for atrocity victims, and what’s two more, when Ignatius is feverishly dragging the lake for the rotted corpse of his own reputation?  By this logic, anybody, anywhere, can kill anybody they want to and get away with it, as long as generous Uncle Sam has the checkbook open, which seems a bit odd in this era of Shared Sacrifice.  My guess is that Ignatius doesn’t want to make this curious and potentially costly adaptation of the rather universal laws against murder available to just any murderers, but he doesn’t think he has to spell that out for his long-suffering readers, who have long been taught that White Makes Right.

Of course, what WaPoo article would be complete without an anonymous government spokesman to back it up….

Asked about such a third-party mediation to free Davis, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday: “The United States is open to exploring any and all options that could resolve this matter. . . . It’s in our mutual interest to move beyond the Davis issue, and we believe the Pakistanis understand the stakes involved.”

Anything short of an honest trial, which of course isn’t the American Way.  You see, we prefer crooked dealings with other dictatorships to be secret, and involve sacks of unaccounted taxpayer cash…  Says so in the WaPoo.  Naturally, Ignatius also has equally anonymous sources in Pakistani intelligence to back up his dingbattery further:

The Pakistani desire for a resolution was highlighted in an e-mail sent to me Tuesday by a senior ISI official in Islamabad. “Things are on the mend and in the larger interests of peace and stability in the region, there has been an agreement to continue to work together,” the official said.

Or, as Nixon put it toward the end, “You have to save the plan!”  Not wanting to sound too much like a pampered imperialist, Ignatius mines his little heart for a bit of empathy for the Pakistanis who were flagrantly lied to by both his newspaper and his government:

The Pakistanis feel they were initially misled about the case. Immediately after the arrest, an embassy official in Washington contacted the CIA and asked if Davis worked for the agency; he apparently was told no. The official asked again on Feb. 2 and again, the agency is said to have denied involvement.

They “feel” misled?  Initially?  The embarrassing sight of neocons apologizing, not for their actions, but for the runaway emotions of their victims, never ceases to amaze, but this whopper is something to behold.  But he goes on, assuming that the reader is either as stupid as he is, or only reads the dubious and fawning reporting on the subject in his own paper:

The paperwork for Davis’s visa and work assignment is fuzzy, at best. He was carrying three different ID cards when he was arrested. He wasn’t included on a Jan. 25 U.S. list of people needing to be registered with the Foreign Office; his name is said to have been added within a day or two after his arrest. It’s still not clear just what he was doing in Lahore, or whether he may have worked as a Defense Department contractor before shifting to the CIA.

Literate Americans know he was a mercenary formerly employed by Blackwater, no less, and then carried his murderous “talents” to the CIA, where he could suckle at the taxpayer teat and be a “diplomat,” to boot.  This is only complicated if you work at (or worse, read) America’s Worst Newspaper.  As if understandably worried that his contemptible, ridiculous idea might be seen as the pathetic Hail Mary it is, Ignatius decides to party like it’s 2002 and toss in a Mushroom Cloud:

For now, the one certainty is that the CIA and ISI would like to resolve this issue quietly, with outside help, if necessary – before it gets any worse. If mediation fails and the case goes to court, says one Pakistani, it will be an “atomic bomb.”

Well, if you add in the WaPoo, Ignatius, and the rest of them, there are those who would regard a fair trial as an event like Hiroshima; the rest of us know the fallout in that unlikely case will blow the other way; that’s why Ignatius, and probably the Obama Administration, would prefer to go the “Blood Money” route.  It’s only money, after all.  The blood is from the little people.

Hag — (Gotta give him credit for calling me by my first name, anyway…)

Moments ago, the Senate voted to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Well, thanks to crusading liberals like Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Robert Gates, and the overwhelming majority of all other Americans supporting such an overdue effort, they did.  And?

When that bill reaches my desk, I will sign it, and this discriminatory law will be repealed.

Whew.  Given your recurring capitulations to the right, I was afraid you might finally make a veto threat, about five too late, but thanks for taking pen in hand.

Gay and lesbian service members — brave Americans who enable our freedoms — will no longer have to hide who they are. The fight for civil rights, a struggle that continues, will no longer include this one.

Yeah, but thanks to you, everyone but the very rich are still well and truly fucked, as well as anybody who gives a rat’s ass about “our freedoms,” but I know you never liked me for my brains in the first place.

This victory belongs to you. Without your commitment, the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.

You mean, like all the other ones?

Instead, you helped prove again that no one should underestimate this movement. Every phone call to a senator on the fence, every letter to the editor in a local paper, and every message in a congressional inbox makes it clear to those who would stand in the way of justice: We will not quit.

We?  You’re including yourself in this group?  I hope the Secret Service is about to walk in with a great big silky garment bag, because otherwise, this shtick isn’t going over.

This victory also belongs to Senator Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and our many allies in Congress who refused to let politics get in the way of what was right.

Also?  For your information, like everything else you’ve “accomplished” over the last two years, those two were the ones who stood up for “politics” in the real sense, that is, representing the people who elected them.  You, on the other hand, have squandered your mandate, alienated your base, and made permanent the horrendous policies of your universally despised predecessor, because you’ve chosen “politics” over what was “right,” or even potentially effective, every time, and boy oh boy, did that turn out to be dumb.  (See Shellacking, The….)

Like you, they never gave up, and I want them to know how grateful we are for that commitment.

They haven’t given up yet, which says a lot more about them than you.  Both have been politically damaged, and Pelosi lost her speakership, due to your utter failure to use your bully pulpit and your self-destructive servility to their, and the American people’s,  political enemies.

Will you join me in thanking them by adding your name to Organizing for America’s letter?

No, I’d prefer to thank them personally.

I will make sure these messages are delivered — you can also add a comment about what the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” means to you.

Ah, you’re suddenly allowing comments?  It’s tempting, admittedly.

As Commander in Chief, I fought to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it weakens our national security and military readiness. It violates the fundamental American principles of equality and fairness.

As Commander in Chief, you could have eradicated the policy in January 2009, if you felt so strongly about it.  You didn’t.

But this victory is also personal.

Really?  This better be good.

I will never know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of my sexual orientation.

But I know my story would not be possible without the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before me — many I will never meet, and can never thank.

Uh, a lot of the people you could thank happen to be (inconveniently) still alive, but you’re already in their spam files, so they’re missing this little missive.

I know this repeal is a crucial step for civil rights, and that it strengthens our military and national security. I know it is the right thing to do….

That may well be, but since you also think that it’s just dandy for our military and our “national security” that we should continue to expand our wars all over the globe and bomb, torture, and kill whomever we please, for whatever (usually secret) reason, I naturally take your opinions with a rather large grain of salt.

Thank you,

Barack

Barack?  Thanks, but I’d prefer to call you Mr. President, if only you’d help me out and act like one.  Otherwise, get thee to the furrier.

In light of the Wikileaks fiasco, I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about good ol’ Ike, who chose to use his final speech as President, a mere two and a half minutes long, to warn America that we’d end up, well, how we have ended up if we didn’t watch out.  Clearly, we didn’t watch out.  We have given up both liberty and prosperity to fatten America’s War Industry, which is, globally, about the last place where our products still rule, and the threat to Democracy  Ike warned so darkly about is no longer some faint, distant possibility, but a plain fact we live with each day.  Both parties are War Parties now, and America only survives, albeit haltingly, on war.

Take our media….  Please.  Stung by the reality of their death-dealing credulity over the last decade, the pancaked know-nothings that pollute the airwaves are in angelic unison touching manicured hands to their fevered foreheads at the audacity, the noive, if you speak Bugs Bunny, of people they don’t even know, like that Assange person, running around behind their backs and committing actual journalism.  Everyone who’s anyone knows that sort of thing simply isn’t done anymore; it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted these days, which is quite evidently a lot less work than that old way.  (see Gregory, David and Mitchell, Andrea, just for starters…)

I have to wonder what would happen on the Sunday talk shows today had, say, President Obama delivered something like Eisenhower’s 1961 speech.  Naturally, the panel would include Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and/or David Brooks, with maybe Joe Lieberman for balance.  Ike’s words, though demonstrably true, would have gone over like a fart in church in that crowd, whose very existence in such a public square not only owes itself to the military industrial complex, but to the complete capture of the purported Fourth Estate by it.

It was inevitable, really, that virtually all government spending would eventually end up in the hands of the military; no other government function is so immune to oversight and performance review, and like a bunch of Willie Suttons (selling guns instead of toting them), the sharp operators went where the money was.  You see, unlike the previous plutocrats the government lavishly sponsored from the railroad, oil, and infrastructure industries, the war industry doesn’t even have to do anything to scoop up deficit-financed dollars by the truckload; the tedious tasks of, say building a dam or a bridge that won’t fall down or getting an actual product to market have been completely eliminated.  They’ve already gone Galt, simply taking the money and running, leaving the corpses behind.  Ike, who unlike the chickenhawks of today abhorred war as one who experienced it must, saw the danger and tried to warn us, but was utterly drowned out by the  McNamaras, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Powells, (and the medal-hungry generals who served them) in the ensuing decades.

Now, we’re faced with increasing economic hardship and dire  predictions of national doom without so-called austerity for everyone but the richest, but yet the half of our “discretionary” budget that goes to fighting failed and never-ending wars remains so sacrosanct that only Ron Paul and a few lefty Democrats in congress dare to question it, even as poll after poll shows that most Americans want the wars to stop, now.  The media religiously gloss over this inconvenient truth, in increasingly crazy and obvious ways, of which Wikileaks is only the most recent example.

Just as Eisenhower predicted way back in 1961, the military industrial complex would, if left unchecked, first destroy our Democracy, and then go on to destroy our prosperity.  While Ike may have spent more time on the golf course than President Obama (despite what you hear on Fox), he clearly did a little more thinking out there.

Trouble is, of course, that mass genocide is problematic, both logistically and politically, and as such a whole lot of human beings unworthy of consideration stubbornly continue to exist, seemingly out of spite.  Take the world’s billion or so Muslims:  ”They” attacked us on 911, and as such no threat of national bankruptcy can deter us from teaching them a lesson, using bombs, drones, invasions, broomsticks, and buckets of water  as visual aids, and when they’re slow on the uptake, bring in the dogs.  War is peace, and don’t you forget it.  Chickenhearted fretting about the inevitable blowback is dismissed out of hand, and the cost, what cost?  Apparently, the “small government” righties so relentlessly fetishize can afford to have lots of wars going on while enforcing deep austerity at home, even though thousands of years of history say no.

In an interesting little video speech of Jay Rosen talking about Fox News that Balloon Juice linked to over the weekend, Rosen outlined the ease with which right-thinking Americans are taught to forget what happened five minutes ago, at five-minute intervals, and thus continue to hold their rather counterintuitive but yet startlingly consistent beliefs.  Though Rosen lapses into a lot of boring self-indulgence in his 15-minute lecture, he hits on an important truth:  what is actually happening on any given day is incidental to the right, since the story told will always be the same.  Those elitist liberals and dirty darkies are at it again, and here’s why you should be resentful, and continue watching Fox to feel better.

Some sharp-eyed liberal smarty called this drearily familiar phenomenon “epistemic closure,” and ought to be permanently silenced for it.  What it is, you don’t need a sheepskin from Harvard to see; a bunch of craven and self-interested malefactors of great wealth have bought up huge chunks of the public discourse and with it a thriftily  slim majority of our elected officials, and they have a neat and ever expanding fairy tale to explain why this is a good thing for people who think “epistemic” has to do with boils or something.  These people are being systematically taught to reject all “facts” as some sort of liberal plot, and keep clicking their heels and visualizing Kansas, even as their puppet masters laugh all the way to their eighth vacation  home (via Gulfstream).

Republican policies, which above all favor the wealthiest over everyone else, always tend to make most Americans angry and insecure, so Republican politics, since they’ve been in such ascendance these past dozen or so years, are now about channeling that understandable anger into electing more Republicans, usually by declaring that non-Republican people are just bad, and no attention should be paid to them.  They call liberals naive Utopians and whatnot, but yet their own unbroken and provable record of failure is airily dismissed because the despised and un-American liberals stood in the way of their greatest achievements, and next time they’ll get it right, you’ll see.

No Republican has ever balanced a budget in my entire lifetime, and no Democrat has ever markedly increased it, but the Republicans are the party of Fiscal Responsibility.  The stock market, under Democratic Presidents, has performed markedly better than under Republican misrule, but the Republicans are the party of prosperity.  Abortions go up under Republican Presidents and down under Democratic ones, but the Republicans are the “pro-life” party.  No Republican has ever won a war (since that man, Lincoln, anyway), but the Republicans are the biggest, baddest, thing going on the world stage.   No Republican has ever advanced a policy whose benefits would even peripherally redound the the non-rich majority, but they call the Democrats “elitist.”

It isn’t easy living with so many flagrant contradictions, but it is easier when you believe, as the Red Queen said, many “impossible things” before breakfast.  That’s why God made “Fox and Friends.”  If Miss America believes it, it must be true, especially so early in the morning.

It seems like such a long time ago, when Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, performing in England, told an audience that she was “embarrassed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”  As an Oregonian I personally was less embarrassed, but I’d been routinely apologizing to foreign friends about Bush for years; he was so deliberately obnoxious, especially internationally, that any American setting foot on a European stage had to be deeply ashamed, and simple manners would mandate saying so.  To all the world save a third or so of the dumbest Americans, the man is and was a complete and utter failure.  That plain fact lies behind the fierce and immediate manufactured outrage over Maines’ remark; Rove and his henchmen simply couldn’t have people stating the obvious about their naked emperor and what a small, well, decider he had.

Like many before and since who were targeted by similar White House smear campaigns during the Bush era, Maines learned her lesson, one that, to this day, few elected Democrats and almost no one in the mainstream media has figured out: back down to a bully, and you will never see your lunch money again as long as you live.  Republicans, having not a single policy that can be honestly sold to voters, deal only in lies, smears, and character assassination; always have, always will.  It’s simply, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” updated with, “and if you do, it’s because you hate America.”  Concede to half of their kooky ideas, and they’ll still take their toys and go home, blaming you for your intransigence and extremism.  Concede to all of them, and they’ll come up with even kookier ones to demand next.  Meanwhile all the kookiness, put into action, inevitably sends the country down the toilet, and that’s your fault, too.

Why then, is Natalie Maines so much smarter than President Obama, most of the Democrats, and practically all of the liberal media?  It seems that a lot of fancy schooling was wasted on people who, tragically, weren’t paying enough attention on the playground when they were eight, and as such really oughtn’t be trusted with such responsible jobs today.  If we were to believe that the President was being honest when he said he thought he could work with the Republicans going forward, despite their loud and repeated declarations that their only goal was his political demise, then it’s time to stop talking so much about how smart he is.  That is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, with or without Rachel Maddow’s laugh track, and frankly I’m again embarrassed by my president, who like his despised predecessor, is either lying or stupid.

One could forgive Obama’s touching naivete, I suppose, if he gets his information from TV news or, say, the Washington Post, who all still believe in fairies and bipartisanship, not necessarily in that order.  Each day since his election, the media has trotted out a rogue’s gallery of Republican retreads, washouts, and charlatans to predict dire outcomes from any policy to the left of Dick Cheney, and Obama has hardly disappointed them.  Though the unpopular Bush wars continue unabated, foot-stomping generals and unreconstructed neocons in and out of government still want more; ten years in Afghanistan has stealthily grown to thirteen or so, and several new wars have already been picked out for later, under a president whose anti-war stance was what catapulted him to the national spotlight in the first place.  Torture has been pushed under the rug, Guantanamo has been made permanent, illegal spying legitimized, Social Security only lamely defended, gays have not made any gains toward full citizenship (like Latinos), Wall Street and big Pharma have been each handed another multibillion dollar “get out of jail free” card, and huge, ruinously expensive tax cuts for the rich are about to be passed, paid for by “shared sacrifice,” and we all know what that means.  What, pray, could the righties want that they haven’t already gotten?  That’s the scary part, and to those of us not in the media it’s also blindingly obvious.

“Not Ready to Make Nice” would have been a nice and certainly more morally defensible mantra than “Looking forward, not back” for Obama and Democrats in the post-Bush era; Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Yoo, John Bolton, and all the rest are now free, not just from jail, but to go on TV every night to refight previously lost battles, quite successfully, it turns out, while Obama looks like a vacillating, defeated cipher.  How’s that bipartisan-y thing workin’ out for ya?

Obama could learn a thing or two from Natalie Maines, who refused to shut up and sing, won respect, and sold a hell of a lot of records for it.  Notice how no one’s asking her to step down.