When one begins with a narrative already in place to which every occurrence must conform, it’s much easier to come to conclusions about “why” a creepy nerd and loser obsessed with others’ private lives suddenly won three state primaries against much better-funded opponents.  You see, the narrative of the week had already been established,  Liberal Baby Killers Bully Real Americans, and then it happened twice more!  Bonus!  Tiny, powerless, retiring outfits like Susan G. Komen and the Catholic Hospital Complex both got cruelly slapped down by thuggish, hairy-legged harridans, provoking ritual pearl-clutching and chest beating (depending on gender, of course), not from those concerned, but from those paid to bloviate about such things. While that whining temper tantrum was still very much in progress, with more to come in TV green rooms across America, the dreaded, commie 9th Circuit Court tossed Proposition 8 out on its well-scrubbed Mormon ear.  The God-botherers are, as you can imagine, thanking Supply Side Jesus for dealing them such a Royal Flush of false victimhood, and are not unexpectedly using Santorum’s “victory” to “prove” America is as obnoxiously holy as they are.

Right.  The same America that so recently fell for Newt.  As I’ve mentioned before, the dire problems the Republicans are facing in 2012 are all of their own making, and all a product of the descent of the party from governing idea to marketing scam.  As Americans, even Republicans, we are quite aware we’re being scammed, because its happened so often before.  Basically, the Republicans have sold out to a bunch of wealthy interests who don’t have the country’s interests at heart, and enabled them to systematically loot its wealth.  Since saying so honestly, much less campaigning on such a program, would never do, they have instead promised the moon and the stars to religious zealots, racists, gun nuts, and what have you, inconveniently guaranteeing a bunch of disgruntled crazy people watching their every move, when all they wanted was the keys to the treasury.

Putting up a malleable figurehead like Reagan, Bush, or Romney, and then using the now-purchased presidency to pack the courts and agencies with fellow plunderers, thus, must constantly be accompanied by distracting sideshows to fool the rubes into thinking the party is, as Bill O’Reilly put it, “Looking out for” them.  This time, the rubes are getting restless, and you can hardly blame them.

As we approach the 2012 elections, I have to admit grudgingly sympathizing with the poor Republican contenders on  some level; everywhere you look, one (hilarious) presidential aspirant after another has to deal with the fact that large blocs of their party hates them, for one reason or another.  The reasons, to a sane person at least, often seem a bit unfair:  the party of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay “hate” Newt Gingrich for being a corrupt Washington Insider with a tenuous connection to reality?  The party of David Vitter and Rudy Giuliani “hate” Mitt Romney for (barely) straying from Christianist orthodoxy, fully clothed?  What the hell?

Well, let’s call it what it is, an embarrassment of riches.  Long ago, before Fox News (!) and 24/7 hate radio, conservatives realized that the only reason, given their relative wealth, that they didn’t bestride the world like a Colossus was that their ideas were both dumb and detrimental to most Americans, let alone other humans on earth.  In his infamous 1970 Memo, which led a bonkers, elitist ideologue to a Nixon lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell spoke for fellow plutocrats in saying that, essentially, the far-too-comfortable rabble has caught on to our scams.  We’d better have a Plan B, but fast.

That plan, of course, was to flood the public discourse with propaganda from think tanks, media outlets, and newly endowed “professors” to spout the plutocrat line, which, as you might expect, wouldn’t be too successful if other opinions were heard.  Thus, the strategy’s practitioners, chief among them Nixon himself, decided that rather than bothering wih refuting liberal ideas, still a somewhat tall order to this day, they would focus on refuting liberal people, whom, duly discredited, would finally shut up once and for all.  The Hate Campaign was born.

This wasn’t the easiest proposition, understandably, given that the poorer and less educated group they were attempting to persuade would undoubtedly be harmed by their ultimate goals.  They had to go for hate, and go big, before anybody wised up.  To this end, taxes, which largely went, than as now, to support the military and (then, anyway) beloved entitlement programs for white people, had to be re-branded as extravagant cash transfers to shiftless Darkies; wars had to be sold as rare opportunities for vicarious triumph to an increasingly marginalized and powerless populace, and respecting foundational civil liberties had to be portrayed as dangerous capitulation to treacherous hordes abroad and at home.

It’s a neat trick, really….  Convincing the dumbest and most resentful in any society that everything, and I mean everything, they don’t like is somehow connected. Once you’ve done that, you’re off to the races.  You see, most people, particularly in the hard times Republican policies invariably create, are left looking around for solutions to what ails them; the key to eliminating such dangerous receptivity is to have the most reasonable, but unwanted, solutions pre-tainted by painstakingly encouraged cultural biases.

With Nixon, this meant a whole lot of industrial-grade hippie punching, and it worked so well at he time that it’s still in wide use despite its often tinny, anachronistic feel.  It may be both dumb and insultingly cheesy to lots of people, but the fact that the hippie’s modern-day equivalents want to, say, protect the environment, reliably creates a massive call amongst rank-and-file righties for more pollution has become, for polluters, anyway, the gift that keeps on giving.  That the (now proven correct) resistance to our retarded, failed adventure in Iraq was advanced by  our younger and less conservatively attired Americans means that Fox News “culture warriors”  will dutifully scream for more wars until kingdom come, sooner rather than later.  And on and on.

As I’ve said many times before, this is a project that has become a victim of its own success.  Hopelessly saddled with a befuddled band of followers whose hate, like a 1960′s Alabama firehose, must constantly be turned  on something, the Republicans are finding that even their own bespoke suits might get unseemly wet spots.  Just mention without utter disdain an idea that at some point a “liberal” might have ever endorsed, no matter how mundane, and the fury is unleashed.  George Bush found this out when he tried to hand his anti-labor supporters an immigration bill, John McCain was similarly chastened when he said, from experience, that torture wasn’t okay, and Ron Paul, who is momentarily leading the polls in Iowa, was nonetheless almost booed off the stage for the impermissible effrontery of talking about pointless, costly wars like they were a bad thing.

In their relentless pursuit of hate-driven infallibility, Republicans have painted themselves into an interesting corner when it comes to sewing up a presidential election….  Their people have been taught, carefully, you might say, to hate so much that they can no longer love.  Even their own candidates.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

Not surprisingly, Palin’s Fox colleague (!) Karl Rove, sees the unlikelihood of a White House decorated in gingham and moose heads with ATV’s littering the lawn anytime soon, and has wisely sounded the alarm early about Palin’s undeniable dingbattery and its sobering potential to rob Republicans of another shot at packing the courts and starting some more wars, which would both help make voting even more pointless for ordinary Americans, a longtime goal of the right.  He realizes that any Republican President, who will by current definition be frantically consumed with robbing Americans of their freedom and future, not to mention their money, will be always relying on “plausible deniability” something he learned at the knee of his first hero, Richard Nixon.  Rove’s clearly as nervous as a whore in church about Palin’s frighteningly inescapable power, which is the sort of thing can’t help but warm the cockles of my heart.

You see, Palin’s long on denial, alright, but that plausible thing?  Not going to happen in this lifetime.  That woman would lose, badly, a spelling bee with Dan Quayle, a personality contest with Leona Helmsley, and a game of Scrabble against her son Trig, but for the knuckle-dragging, semiliterate “base” the Republicans have so shamelessly and effectively courted of late, all these unseemly qualities are what make her so darn lovable.  Without Palin, and the horse(shit) she rode in on, the Republicans know they are toast, however lavishly buttered by their corporate masters.  The trailer park crowd they need to win isn’t going to meekly accept their beloved Rodeo Queen being tossed aside for a silver-tongued larcenist like Mitt Romney or a nerdy egghead like Paul Ryan, just two of several reliable servants of the plutocracy Republicans have trotted out so far.  Those guys, after all, know big words and stuff, which betrays a sneaky, crypto-foreign elitism  that is now all but automatically disqualifying for the Republican primary voter of the new century.  This convenient but increasingly problematic new “base,” stoked by Fox News and a boatload of  corporate money, is on a stupid binge, and they just can’t get enough anymore, no matter the consequences.  George Bush was like a tantalizing ice cream cone, and after that they want nothing less than Sarah, who is, by comparison, a Double Banana (Republic) Split with extra marshmallow goo and three maraschino cherries on top.  (No hot fudge, though; it’s too, well, brown…) No wonder Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden went over like a fart in church with this crowd, who already wear XXL t-shirts proclaiming, “I’m with stupid,” and would be happy to sport the same pithy phrase on a bumper sticker, with “2012″ tacked on at the end.

You go, girl.

Of course, anyone capable of, say, telling time would realize how ridiculous his fears are; if Abdullah and Habib are going to blow up a plane, you can bet they’ll be smart enough to wear Dockers and ball caps, thus slipping by Williams’ eagle eye for terrorists.  Maybe NPR fired you for your jaw-dropping stupidity, Juan…. Ever think of that?  Of course not; it’s something in the air at Fox.  Luckily for Juan, their newly minted Free Speech Hero, Fox has a crack team at human resources who slapped together a $2 million multiyear contract for doing even more of whatever it is he does there before the day was quite over, and were he not so astonishingly dumb, he’d have taken the money and shut up.  (Then again, if he were smart, he wouldn’t have been allowed on Fox, and none of this would have happened in the first place.)

But instead, like Lieberman before him, along with virtually every other loser righty now lavishly employed by Fox, he turned his well-deserved repudiation into a whiny, self-discrediting episode of verbal diarrhea that revealed him to be nothing more than any of the rest of them; he’s already written a “column,” if you want to call it that, that unloads years of resentment at the mean and unacceptably “liberal” NPR, in which he gamely employs his eighth-grade writing skills to prove that NPR’s only offense was in not firing the ungrateful, insubordinate dimwit sooner.

But it’s clear that Williams will be right at home at Fox, where he will be appearing tonight, a few million richer, to cry on Bill O’Reilly’s shoulder about how “political correctness” is ruining everything that is Right About America, and probably recite the Teabagger oath. More power to him; as Fox would say, “I wish him well.”  And I mean it the same way Fox does.

I am Carl Paladino, a father, a husband, a builder and a business owner. I am neither perfect, nor a career politician. I have made mistakes in this campaign – I have made mistakes all my life – as we all have. I am what I am – a simple man who works hard, trusts others, and loves his family and fears for the future of our State.

Again, no mention of that unusual family of his, with a little Palinesque “I’m stupid, too, so I can’t be all bad” thrown in for good measure.

Yesterday I was handed a script. I redacted some contents that were unacceptable. I did also say some things for which I should have chosen better words. I said other things that the press misinterpreted and misstated. I sincerely apologize for any comment that may have offended the Gay and Lesbian Community or their family members. Any reference to branding an entire community based on a small representation of them is wrong.

Here’s real genius in action; he freely admits that he reads scripts handed him by whatever religious nuts he’s courting that day, and rather than disputing its authors, leaves out some, but not all, of the crazy stuff in it.  Then he, of course, blames the press for his own laziness, cravenness, and blatant pandering to extremists.

My personal beliefs are:

1) I am a live and let live person. That’s pragmatic, given that he takes his 10-year-old love child to campaign events and everything, but since the group he was addressing decidedly does not believe in “live and let live,” his “refudiation” of their views makes him look, well, not too bright.

2) I am 100% against discrimination of any group. I oppose discrimination of any kind in housing, credit, insurance benefits or visitation. Well, that’s a bit more modern than, say, Strom Thurmond, but considerably to the right of New Yorkers.

3) I am 100% against hate crimes in any form. Nobody asked, but if you’re already running out of “virtues” after two, might as well throw it in.

4) I am in support of civil agreements and equal rights for all citizens. I guess he means Civil Unions, but he decided that the moment wasn’t right to say anything too specifically pro-gay, WHEN APOLOGIZING TO GAY PEOPLE.  Sheesh.

5) My position on marriage is based on my personal views. I have the same position on this issue as President Barrack (sic) Obama. I have previously stated I would support a referendum by New York voters. I have proposed Initiative and Referendum so New Yorkers can decide important issues like this. Yeah, just like when Alabama voted to do away with Jim Crow, Carl.  It would also help if you, say, knew how to spell the President’s name, and if your personal definition of marriage weren’t One Man/Several Women.

6) The portrayal of me as anti-gay is inconsistent with my lifelong beliefs and actions and my prior history as an (sic) father, employer and friend to many in the gay and lesbian community. But it’s absolutely consistent with what you said just a day ago; I know you didn’t write it, but you did say it, and the portrayal seems pretty apt.

I am concerned with the future for all our citizens, gay, straight, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim and Agnostic. Although I am not perfect I do admit my mistakes. I will reach out to leaders of the gay community to educate me on how to better represent my support for the rights of all citizens. If elected as your governor I will stand and fight for all gay New Yorkers rights. I ask you for forgiveness on my poorly chosen words and the publication by others not involved with our campaign of unredacted script that did not reflect my oral statement or match my personal feelings. Please go to my website www.paladinoforthepeople.com to learn more detail about the issues including my staunch support for civil rights for all New Yorkers.

Carl Paladino

I guess ol’ Carl needs to go to the Karl Rove school of Lying in Politics.  First, admitting you’re wrong, even if you are, is always a mistake, and apologizing just makes it worse.  You turn off the religious crazies you were initially courting, and the group you initially disparaged isn’t going to believe your fake apology, either.  Much better to attack, misdirect, blame the victims, and quickly move on; you lose less votes that way.  Alas, Carl is a bit too dumb to grasp this, and as a result, has probably spared New Yorkers the embarrassment of having a stupid person for their Governor.

Update:  Sure enough, some Taliban-like rabbi has already withdrawn his prior endorsement of Paladino, and no drag queens have moved over to his side, either.  Quelle surprise.

In this astonishing video, multimillionaire radio and TV Huckster Glenn Beck speaks, solemnly and with laughably faked empathy, to a bunch of rubes about how “we” are going to have to make deep sacrifices to pay off the Republican debt that faces the country.  ”We” might lose our pensions.  ”We” might lose our jobs.  ”We” might even lose our homes.  It’s time to take our “medicine,” but at least we have “each other.”  Really.  He said that, and not as a laugh line, either.  Now, Fox watchers believe a whole lot of really stupid things, but if they believe that Glenn Beck, who made in excess of $30 million last year and is a global celebrity, is going to be sharing a shelter bed with them in the coming apocalypse, one has to marvel that they are capable of walking down a street without hitting a telephone pole, let alone have spare money to throw away on overpriced gold coins.

Long ago, Republicans realized that their rich-coddling, militaristic, and elitist policies harmed the great majority of Americans, so they cannily cast about for some stupid people to bring along for extra votes, and they found them in abundance; racists, Jesus freaks, and gun nuts, few of whom will ever see any  benefit for doing so, began to vote Republican when the GOP directed, with decreasing subtlety, their appeals to them.  When Nixon spoke of “regional discrimination,” Bush spoke of “Armies of Compassion,” or Reagan launched his campaign in the ironically named Philadelphia, Mississippi, the right voters got the message without requiring them to elaborate in a way that might offend the smarter.

Trouble is, to which Glenn Beck accidentally alluded in the clip, that when you validate and empower the stupid, they start feeling (with some justification) better about themselves, and thereby conclude that their even stupider ideas are pretty good, too, and thus ought be implemented as well.  All Nixon, Reagan, and even Bush had to do was make a few signals to the stupid and then quietly go about their business, which of course was always more focused on the money end, and they could have ridden the tide forever.  Trouble was, Bush looked a little too good in his dunce cap/ flight suit, and was so alarmingly less qualified for office than virtually all of his predecessors, that he actually decided to give the stupid much of what they’d always wanted, if only to (barely, as it turned out…) gain a real election in 2004, and we’re still living with the consequences of his “success” at this malevolent  but undeniably expedient endeavor.

Bush’s loud, proud embrace of his own stupidity was initially a diabolically clever means of humanizing an arrogant  underachiever who was both a legacy at Yale and Harvard and scion of a wealthy and powerful family, but still could barely utter a grammatical, much less substantive, sentence, and, unfortunately, it worked.  People obviously didn’t think he was smart, but they nonetheless wanted “to have a beer with him,” as the ever-fawning media put it.  (Yeah, right.  More like “I’ll have what he’s having”…)  Pundits from Peggy Noonan to Maureen Dowd waxed lyrical about the uncomplicated Manliness his stupidity revealed; choking on a pretzel was all in a day’s work for a guy who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear,” although he used the word constantly, and throughout his disastrous terms a supine media dutifully translated such obviously affected non-words as “wudn’t” and “idn’t” into fit-to-print Queen’s English for the newspapers.

But all this time the rubes were watching, and now they want more, much more.  Having seen one of their own bestride the earth like a Colossus, torturing, bombing, punishing, and sneering all the way, why not now move to eliminate, once and for all, the hated smarties, and then, dummies will finally Rule the World, under the leadership of professor/doctor/whatchamacallit Glenn Beck, oracular Rush Limbaugh, and Haiku authoress Sarah Palin?   Well, because that’s a little too stupid.  Big GOP donors don’t work for free, you know, and somebody’s got to pay for that Free Market, after all.

So today Republicans, to great fanfare, released their “Pledge to America,” a tired, rehashed pile of manipulative, war-mongering horseshit written by a lobbyist that only aims to increase the wealth of the wealthy and the suffering of everyone else, returning to the traditional Republican ignoring of the stupid, and it went over like a fart in church, literally.  Only the wealthiest of the religious nuts like Gary Bauer found much to love about it; Erick Erickson, Laura Ingraham, and many others denounced its lack of emphasis on something they call “moral values,” while remaining guardedly optimistic about how much cash the rich (like them) were slated to rake in if it became law.

Beck, of course, amply demonstrates that the stupid on which Republicans have long depended  has now gotten a bit out of hand….  How can Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, et al survive if we really went back to 1908 tax levels?   Is it considered smart to tell a lot of stupid people that imminent loss of their jobs and homes, if they haven’t lost them already, is somehow a good thing?

It’ a long way from “Morning in America,” it seems, but in the end you have to dance with the ones that brung ya.  Good luck with that.

You always know somebody’s headed for a deeply satisfying fall when they resort to engaging in a loud, sudden, and stunningly counterfactual rebranding of themselves, seemingly overnight.  Actual behavioral changes are never required for this spectacle, though; it’s supposed to be enough to simply rename shit, searchlights blaring, “Shinola” and call it a day.  At worst, maybe someone on CNN will say, “Some Democrats say it still stinks,” but the question will be forever left hanging when they cut to commercial.  Today Big Food announced that it was changing the name of high fructose corn syrup to “corn sugar.”  Just like that.  It’s not as if it’s no longer the same obesity culprit that has crowded out more healthy and sustainable crops through its relentlessly  finagled monopoly over America’s sweet tooth; the only problem was that the poison formerly known as “high fructose corn syrup” had become saddled with a bad name.  As of today, with its new and improved name, this sinister substance been magically transformed into something so down-home, yet sexy, that one might even wax lyrical over it, just like the Archies.  You are my candy, girl, and you’ve got me wanting you. (I went ahead and picked the Archies for Big Food’s surrogates, rather than, say, the Rolling Stones’ and their more politically delicate “Brown Sugar” for obvious reasons…)

Of course, such cynical adoption of manipulative, fake names for things to replace their more honest but no longer flattering real ones could never work so often, nor be tried even more often, in the presence on a sentient media.  Sadly, though, we don’t have that here; if Jon Stewart doesn’t cover it, the rebranders have an even chance of making the new name stick, as we’ve seen with everything from wars to corporate scofflaws.  Does anyone remember that Altria is a tobacco company?  Can anyone name all the many names given to our debacle in Iraq over the years?  The real name of the “Death Tax? Pour a little sugar on me, Baby.

A poll released today shows that despite the ostentatious media outpouring over the awesomeness and unbeatability of the Republicans this fall, what few Republican policies that have been accidentally leaked by this media-averse bunch are about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  Though only 45% of people think the health care bill was much, only 32%, most of whom are on Medicare, want to see it repealed.  Less than that want the tax cuts extended if they include those to the rich, and a thin plurality don’t want the 14th Amendment fiddled with, either.  (Ain’t America grand?)  The other expensive Republican mistresses always in need of lavish taxpayer support, the war machine and the pollution/sprawl industries, have been subtly left out of the conversation, for good reason, but I’d like to see a poll about that, too.  Call it what you will, “taking America back,” when actually outlined to real voters, is the last thing anyone but the craziest (and most cynical) want.   But you have to hand it to Republicans; they know no one wants what they’re selling, and they know renaming it might not be enough, so they’re moving to Plan B:   At Least We’re White.

For all the overconfident bluster, the GOP is still unable to level with America and win, and as such must conjure up not just new names for themselves, but for everyone else, too.  Thus, the bland, overcautious Obama Administration must be rebranded every six months, from socialist to communist to fascist to the latest, something called “anti-colonial Kenyan,” with breathtaking speed and the attendant widespread amnesia such speed requires.  Tiny tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, cynically planted by Bush’s deceptive budgeting to take place anyway, are turned into dark attempts at wealth redistribution and class warfare.  (The bad kind…)  Widespread harrumphs from the media and outright guffaws from the left at Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s cheesy cashing-in on 9/11 and the righty noise machine that lives for it have been miraculously transformed into, get this,  an attempt to destroy capitalism, according to “professor” Glenn Beck.  If these guys are riding so high, couldn’t they get somebody better to write their material?

It’s going to take more than a spoonful of sugar to make the GOP’s medicine go down, and they obviously know it.

I remember my frustration in arguing with my older brother about politics in the late 80′s.  Every discussion would begin with his solemn announcement that “the basic policy of the Soviet Union is to take over the world.”  Never mind that as far as I could see, the very idea that a poor, frozen, breadline-ridden country spottily populated by surly, fur-hatted proletarians and lumpy, androgynous women was really poised to conquer the Free World seemed about as likely as Maggie Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick jointly winning a wet t-shirt contest, the bullying nature inherent in forcing others to believe such nonsense made the entire endeavor of arguing with him an utter waste of time.

All these years later, nothing has changed.  Why tell the truth when a lie sounds better, and of course more apocalyptic, on TV?  In the 90′s, Clinton was going to confiscate all guns, put right-thinking Americans in prison camps, pay reparations to the descendants of slaves, and he had, in addition to all the tarts, a little murder operation on the side, and of course he was going to destroy the economy, to boot.  When none of that panned out (except for the tarts, of course), you’d expect a little humility, but none was forthcoming.  By the time they had thoroughly trashed Gore without having to resort to such demented and discredited soothsaying, the right took a conveniently brief break from worrying about the dire future ahead when they found their Leader in George W. Bush.

Of course, being the fully captured cheerleaders for an administration that was busily bankrupting and trashing America as no administration ever had before, the righties had to find something to talk about, so they turned, quite effortlessly, to racism.  Since the Bush Administration had loudly and unambiguously denounced Islamophobia even as they showed they couldn’t tell one Habib from the next when picking out their wars, illegal immigrants were the preferred scapegoats of the Bush era, and, typically unable to confine their “arguments” to actual facts, the loudmouths of the right thundered about the imminent threat of “Reconquista,” or, you guessed it, brownies taking over.  The threat of the brown menace loomed so large in the eyes of this delusional but devoted bunch, that they actually dealt Bush one of his few defeats; scuttling the immigration reform his agribusiness and union-busting buddies had coveted for decades.  As Bush’s fortunes continued to decline, his faux “tolerance” for the Muslims he was gleefully bombing lost whatever sway it once had, and led to yet another startling defeat on the Dubai Ports deal.  Republicans had learned at least one thing from Bush’s many debacles, Katrina not least among them; when the going gets tough, the tough get racist, and racism is the little black dress of Republican politics; it goes with everything.

Obama’s election finally knit together every thread of Republican obsessions into a glorious Christmas sweater of white angst; the flowering of white supremacy we are seeing now was all but inevitable, and as usual, it is growing in the soil of preposterous predictions: in addition to the usual overheated fears of the Clinton era, Obama is, also, as Sarah Palin might say, a communist/fascist, Muslim/liberation theologist, community organizer/elitist, who plans to enforce “Sharia Law” even as he commits sodomistic acts on white Americans such law forbids.  You see, it doesn’t have to be logical nor subject to the slightest bit of internal consistency; if it’s bad, use it, and let God (or Newt Gingrich) sort it out during the Rapture, carried live on Fox with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin moderating.

To commemorate 9/11 as only he could, ol’ Newt  has now released (on 9/11, natch…), an unintentionally hilarious “documentary,” America At Risk, available for $19.95, in which he and his robot-Barbie third wife darkly intone that Muslim hordes are about to, you guessed again, take over, making lavish use of scary 9/11 footage and a parade of nutjobs babbling, but all of it has a desperate, warmed-over feel, like the loser gas-pump jockey waxing drunkenly lyrical about his high school football days.  The sky may indeed be falling, but I’ll make this humble suggestion to Newt and his ilk:  just pull out your umbrella, Newtie; it worked for Wile E. Coyote, and it’ll work for you, too.