You have to sympathize with Mortimer, and not just because that’s his name.  Not being able to offer the voters anything good each election cycle, Republicans continually have to remind us that all these sacrifices we have to make for their profligacy are the tithe we must pay to avoid something really, really, bad.  The bad things are as interchangeable as they are numerous, and all ludicrously unlikely.  Mushroom Clouds, Communism, Fascism, Death Panels, FEMA Camps, Reparations, One-World Government, European-Style Socialism, Collectivism, and my personal favorite, Sharia Law.  People not confined to mental institutions actually say, on a daily basis, the the Islamofascists are going to come over and forcibly put burquas on our women.  Seriously.  Here’s Rush Limbaugh, whom the Free Market has chosen to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for his yammerings, waxing all feminazi on 600 radio stations across America:

Let’s take, at face value, the template that the partisan political hacks spew at me. I am, according to them, anti-women’s rights. Equal rights for women is no concern of mine, right? I’m the guy that came up with the name “feminazi.” I’m not a friend of women’s rights, they say. If that were true, I would be pushing for the mosque at Ground Zero. If I were anti-women’s rights, I would be all for Sharia law. Sharia law is a not-so-stealth way to undermine women’s rights in this country. It would be a perfect cause if I was who they say I am.

Yes, Rush, some Muslims have some weird ideas about women, but your oft-spoken views are as bad or worse, and your relationships with women haven’t exactly turned out stellar, either, so it’s pretty audacious for you to take this line of argument, but do go on:

Anti-women’s rights is a cause of the left. That’s who’s pushing Sharia in this country: The left. It’s the left that wants a mosque at Ground Zero. It’s left who thinks “America’s chickens came home to roost” on 9/11. It’s the American left that thinks we got what we deserved on 9/11. It’s the American left that wants the mosque at Ground Zero. No one can be pro-women’s rights and remain silent about the metastasizing cancer that Sharia law is on women’s rights.

Ah, allowing a church and community center to be built on its own property, regardless of religious affiliation, which is to say, following the Constitution, is somehow related to wanting to impose Sharia Law, when any idiot would recognize it as the opposite.  Better yet, “the left,” which is deliberately presented as some monolithic force, is on the side of the terrorists, because some of the braver among us admitted that our foreign policies in the Middle East probably led to 9/11.  Who knew Ron Paul was a lefty?  But the newly-minted Betty Friedan of the AM dial has more:

The left is closer to the politics of Nazis than I will ever be. The person who was a National Socialist and anti-Israel would be anti-capitalist; pro-nationalization of health care, banks, education, car companies; pro-Central Planning; and try to force Israel (against its will and history) to divide its capital, Jerusalem, and to cave in to all of its enemies. None of that describes me. It describes them. It describes the left. Meaning if I were all that they say I am, I’d be one of them. Here is a leftist statist liberal, a person who believes that people should be treated differently according to their gender, the color of their skin, and their religion. Such as: Let’s use NASA to help Muslims feel better about themselves in math and science, and let Muslims build Sharia law shrines anywhere they want and pretend that we don’t know what that means.

Honestly.  The crazy here is so deep and thick, and so clearly from the fever swamps of the Rapture Right, it’s enough to make your head spin.  While he’s clearly at pains here to point out that although he famously favors ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, and torture, he’s no NAZI, Rush is a fat and happy capitalist who just bought himself a fifth wife (after a little rough patch with the drugs and the hookers); do you think he gives a flying fuck about Jerusalem and all that bible crap?  Of course not .  He’s paid, ridiculously lavishly, to foist this horseshit on Idiot America, and so he does.

Zuckerman must be so envious.

Admittedly, the race-based stuff is new, and is a stark enough reminder that the Republicans, having failed so dismally in their attempts to govern, are reduced to yelling “nigger” in trailer parks to avoid discussing what alternative they might provide to Democratic government.  But seriously, for many years nothing the Republicans have said, no matter how loudly, has been true, and if Democrats and the mainstream media were able to put two and two together, they’d have long ago moved from Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify” to Harry Reid’s “whatever they say, you can believe the opposite.”

From Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war, Reagan’s “Welfare queens,” Bush Sr.’s “out of the loop,” to George W. Bush’s “mushroom clouds,” the lies this bunch has told, and the undue credulity they’ve received, is the story of America’s descent into the fascistic oligarchy in which we find ourselves today.  No lie is too big or small to be used for rank, usually unrelated, political gain, and lies are routinely told even if the truth would sound better.  Before the Right had Fox News, virtually the entire AM dial, and a swarm of fake “think tanks” to push its propaganda, lies had to be used sparingly, and couldn’t be too easily or quickly proven incorrect to work.  Now, lies can work their magic in days, allowing politicians to be besmirched, careers to be ruined, and most importantly, false but nonetheless enduring and damaging narratives can be nurtured and built upon before anybody figures out that the whole thing was horseshit.  Worse, when the story inevitably explodes, the liars’ reputation is often advanced, in the fact-averse world created by the lies that conveniently preceded it.  In this absurd environment the truth can’t get its boots on because it’s already wearing cement shoes, and the lies now have an army of intrepid film editors and “reporters” which can cook up a fake story and disseminate it on any topic, any day.

Think of the people who, against all evidence, thought that the big banks ought to be deregulated–  have their careers, or even reputations, suffered?  What about those who touted the Iraq war as necessary, urgent, and the best thing for all concerned?  Or those who though Sarah Palin was brilliant?  Drill, Baby Drill?   In a just world, they’d all be getting rejection letters from WalMart and selling plasma, but instead they have television shows and multiple houses.  Then there are those who disagreed…  Joe Wilson, Paul O’Neill, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Dan Rather; the list is long of those who had the audacity to be correct, prematurely, and suffer greatly for it.

Correctness, it seems, is a dish best served cold as far as the beltway establishment is concerned, a phenomenon that is neither new nor uniquely American: author and admitted Communist Jessica Mitford was tagged for harassment by the Mc Carthyites here and in her native Britain for  her obviously sordid “premature antifascism.”  Somehow, what the Obama Administration has evidently “learned” from this boringly repetitive history is that, maybe this time, the right wing noise machine is onto something, so we had better capitulate pronto.  (Harvard must take anybody these days….)

What this story shows is that the right wing isn’t nearly as racist, deep down, as it pretends to be for its “base.”  They know where to find the people who are most likely to be progressive, smart, and potentially damaging to their worldview in any Democratic administration: amongst its women and minorities, and they thus seek to eliminate and/or marginalize them any way they can.  If the Obama administration had any brains, they would know that Republican smears are the sincerest form of flattery, and act accordingly.  The Republicans would be a little more apoplectic than usual, perhaps, but the Administration would make asses of themselves less frequently.

Republicans had two enemies left to fight from those battles they lost back in the days of Martha Mitchell’s late night bathroom phone calls to Helen Thomas:  journalism and truth.  The first turned out to be remarkably easy, and once accomplished, the second followed with barely a push.  Instead of Nixon’s threats and lawsuits, sunny St. Reagan of General Electric strew flowers before a media that seemed, oddly, chastened by Watergate: offering deregulation, monopolistic expansion the government has wisely theretofore prohibited, and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which, by mandating opposing viewpoints, historically made flat-out lying a lot more problematic.  With astonishing quickness, the many, often independent voices in the media lost their power as giant media conglomerates gobbled up everything in sight and the Wall Street profit demands hacked away at news budgets; soon, the administration could kill a potential Watergate like, say, Iran/Contra, with just a couple of telephone calls.  But all the media horses and all the President’s men couldn’t get a creepy incompetent (with poor delivery, to boot…) reelected in 1992, so much so that they later felt the need to compensate by falling all over his dunderheaded son.  This weird, self-flagellating dynamic turned out badly for everyone on the planet, except old-school right-wingers and the new, greatly empowered media elite, whom, perhaps bitter about what fools they’d made of themselves for embracing Reaganism, went after Clinton so mercilessly partly to “prove” to themselves that they hadn’t been so spectacularly wrong about everything for the past twelve years.

I do think that’s what’s at work today.  Surely Tom Friedman can no longer believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, but he’ll continue to play Pollyanna until he chokes on a Double Down, because if you never, ever, admit you were wrong, and you’re in the media, a lot of times people forget.  Surely George Will recognized that “Climategate” was a bunch of blatantly orchestrated FOX/BP horseshit, but he’ll be wearing his bowtie horizontally before he ever owns up to it.   Ruth Marcus must have some clue that rich Americans did pay taxes in excess of 70% for fifty prosperous years, and the drastic imbalance of wealth and power created when they stopped has caused most of our current problems, but to so utter would make her and almost all of her WaPoo colleagues look like lying nincompoops, so she’ll stay mum.  Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh…  maybe I flatter these charlatans to say they couldn’t possible believe what they say, daily, but I’d bet one of my better furs that they don’t.

The media, as so successfully reconstituted these past few decades, is now as allergic to the truth as the Republicans they fawn over, and in any given situation, you can guess what they’ll say by checking in at Fox Nation.  After all, they’re privileged, often nepotistically promoted, wealthy know-nothings who neither know nor care about the lives of ordinary Americans….  They’ve got theirs thanks to embracing Republicans, no matter how crazy, and their policies, no matter how disastrous, and they intend to keep it; making an ass of yourself is a lot less stinging when you’ve got a cushy, no-work job and millions in the bank.

The latest absurdities, like “Americans are worried about the deficit,” “Americans support torture,” “Americans want to ‘win’ in (insert country here.), and on and on, when polls show the exact opposite, is now par for the course, and given this one-sided and screeching level of discourse, you could (almost) forgive the Obama Administration for caving to the Right on all these things.  Almost.  What the Obama Administration fails to realize is that both the media and Republicans are invested in his failure, if only to try and duct-tape back together their shared records of failure and incompetence, and the only route to political success is to repudiate them entirely and never let a lie go unpunished, either by the liar or the “journalist” who proffered it.  At this crucial point, they need to stop being Charlie Brown and start being Lucy.

Given the record, it’s the media and their Republican masters who ought to be lying on their backs, but they aren’t.  As Charlie Brown would say…   “Good grief!”

Looking at recent history, the examples of forced consumer decisions improbably dressed up as “choice” are legion, and always multiplying.  The crisis in health care, brought about by a bloated, monopolistic system that openly fleeced its captive customers was “solved” by forcing more people to buy the shoddy, unwanted product on offer.  Giant, arrogant, and world-dominating banks emerged from the disaster they created larger and more unavoidable than ever before, and the universally hated telecoms, unscathed by their wanton disregard for their customers’ privacy, went ahead and defeated Net Neutrality, and continued plotting the “synergy” that enables Americans to pay more for worse service than any telecom customers on Earth.

Now, as the Gulf of Mexico drowns in a gusher of oil, well-meaning but evidently feebleminded lefties are proposing that, somehow, “consumers” show their displeasure with the architects of the cataclysm by boycotting BP; good luck with that.  The list of businesses this global leviathan owns is long, but just like its co-conspirators, those that cater to “consumers” are few and far between.  Not buying a six pack at the local AM/PM Minimarket is not going to “send a message” anyone who matters is going to hear at ol’ BP, which is pretty much the way they like it.  I have to think that the merger of two of the crappiest nominal airlines, United and Continental, wasn’t rolled out until a cover of bigger corporate malpractice and buffonery was there to eclipse it; the famous “consumer” might have smelled a rat.

We have reached a point where the corporations extolling the “free market,” in which none of them could compete for 15 minutes, have finally arrived at that Nirvana-like (for them) monopoly, wherein they no longer need fear any consumer backlash, no matter how worthless, venal, and criminal they are in their practices, and hated by their customers, to boot. By the time citizens no longer have anything left but the boycott to show their wrath, the  ”market” has already made the boycott a risible irrelevance, even if the media monopolies who ought to talk about this did their 1st amendment jobs and did so, which they of course don’t.

Shopping, however wisely, is no longer the answer, as we see each day.

Even such unqualified and extremist Republican candidates as George Bush loudly proclaimed themselves to be “uniters, not dividers,” at least before they took office, saving the divisions for later when they were running things.  Divider extraordinaire Nixon himself spoke of “the lift of a driving dream” at his first inaugural, for Pete’s sake.  Now, the perennially Chamberlain-invoking Republicans have only Churchillian “blood, sweat, and tears” to offer (for other people, of course), and they’re depending on unscrupulous and rabid media celebrities who daily declare the government criminal and add new targets for assassination almost every day, to rally their followers.  What happens next?  Well, if you listen to Michele Bachmann, Republicans will sweep to power in November because all Democrats are either dead or hiding under their beds, the first part of which, at least, seems a bit unlikely.  Or, as in the Clinton era, a suitably enraged right-wing psycho kills enough people to preserve the party in power, whether they deserve it or not, because the “resistance” looks not only obstinate and backward but downright terrifying to most Americans?  It’s no longer a close call.

Like most Republican policies, this one is headed for disaster, but as ever before, they love it because of, not in spite of, that fact.  Disasters, they think, become them.  Riding a wave of the pro-wrestling style TV that continues to make them somehow relevant, John McCain and Sarah Palin today not only excused the recent attacks but proudly upgraded their party from the relatively mealy-mouthed “party of no” to the more eagerly bloodthirsty party of, “Hell, no,” and AEI thinks firing David Frum will keep people from noticing that things are going a little off the rails.

Fortunately for them, the many voices on the right are spared a lot of deserved infamy for their cravenness and lies by the usual Democratic fear of mentioning the fact, at least publicly, that they were given a commanding majority to battle just these elements that brought us to this sorry pass.   Worse, Democrats have been equally at fault for the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the deregulation-aided demise of  what we used to call the free press, so when they belatedly looked around, no one is left to speak up as the media-created chicken-fried Kristalnacht erupts all around them.

Having lately obtained just the kind of power to pervert democracy that the Founders couldn’t have envisioned but were reflexively recognized as radio and film greatly aided Hitler’s rise, the media giants have not only embraced, but have effectively seized, the minority political party and sent the majority running for cover at the worst possible moment.  Effectively, Glenn Beck and his many imitators are challenging the political system itself, and so far are thus still able to declare victory at each defeat.  Cleverly, they are also preparing their audiences for the showdown they know they are provoking as they incessantly call for revolution, daring either party to stop them.  Win or lose, it will all look the same on cable, so why not?

But why not?  The media rapture over Republicans never ebbed after Reagan, particularly since he got rid of that pesky Fairness Doctrine and annoying public service obligations that had heretofore made it awkward for media outlets to simply join the government in looting the treasury and bombing the planet.  Whether they were doing any good or not is neither here nor there; the point is that they were doing well, very well.  The ultimate effect of Reagan’s efforts to “deregulate” the media was in fact the opposite; the idea was to concentrate the media into fewer and fewer wealthy hands, who could certainly be relied upon not to rock the boat when the rising tide rolled in, as it did.  Like a tsunami.

Of course, the inconvenient part was that all the policies the righties had dreamed up were, putting it delicately, unlikely to succeed, and lo and behold.  Now, if I were Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, or Liz Cheney, I’d be nervous as a whore in church on Meet the Press, but as luck would have it, everyone else on the set all embraced the same dumb ideas you did, so it’s easier to sell such inanities than it would be, say, on the subway.  Consequently, we have landed in something of a pickle: the minority party and the media have together become so deeply divorced from reality, in lockstep, that they can no longer tell any semblance of the truth without making asses of themselves.

Fortunately, they approach this problem by lying even more extravagantly, to a point where a five year old would question their credibility.  Victory in Iraq?  Nostalgia for Bush?  (maybe they meant neuralgia…)  Socialism?  Fascism?  Perhaps it was different when Bush’s absurd claims about the distribution of his tax cuts were wanly accepted and repeated ad nauseam; the real world consequences, and they’ve been dreadful indeed, of the much crazier stuff that happened afterward continue to unfold, and the media that equally bears responsibility is as invested in “looking forward” as John Yoo.   Thus, they make even bigger asses of themselves, and the “credibility” of the media is but a corn-dotted turd from that predictable and noisy orifice making its final circle.

One really does wonder when premature announcements of “victories” at home and abroad, always from the same source, will finally begin to ring hollow inside the Washington bubble, as they have outside it for several years.  In this important way, the right is reaping the downside of its own success…  you can only fool all of the people some of the time, and that time has passed.

Nice sunrise today on the Hag veranda

UPDATED BELOW:

When I was a kid in the 70′s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family.  As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.”  They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes in the News,” which poked fun at the near-daily shutdowns, cost overruns, and other problems that always plagued that particular branch of corporate welfare, and this was before Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome.”  Somehow, back then people understood, and it was uncontroversial to say on the airwaves, that Nixon was a crook, drug laws were stupid, wars were pointless disasters, and nuclear power was about the dumbest idea anybody ever thought of.   All these things are of course still true today, but few in our media understand this, and fewer recognize that the fact that such plain truths are still contested, much less denied, is a searing indictment of the way these bozos have screwed up doing their jobs over the last few decades.

President Obama announced recently that part of our efforts to combat global warming would be to “invest” in “new” nuclear power.  This cuckoo idea has been a favorite of such “liberal” rags as the NYT and WaPoo, and of course involves large corporations scooping up copious amounts of taxpayer dough, so it’s the sort of idea any politician might find attractive.  But honestly, just because the media was born yesterday doesn’t mean actual Americans were, and will never support nuclear power in their communities, and all it will take is the first plant going up amid protests and doubling and trebling of its budget that this idea will slither into the swamps from which it emerged, along with the reputations of the feckless politicians who supported it.

Forty years of nuclear power fiascoes has taught us a number of things, President Obama, so please take note:

1) The private market will never risk its money on nuclear power, owing to the 50% default rate and ruinous risks.

2) There is still no permanent place to store waste that will remain toxic for 100,000 years.

3) There will be accidents, given the appalling safety record of the industry, and

4) There is ZERO public support for this demented waste of money.

Those who would forget history are doomed to repeat it, and too bad Obama didn’t listen to KGON.  Whenever government takes a big leap into nuclear power , it always turns out the same, just ask the bonkers former Republican governor of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray (KGON called her Risky Delay).  This outspoken anti-environmentalist plunged her state into a decade-long financial and public relations disaster with her wanton embrace of the aptly named WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System), which set out to build seven nuclear plants based on wildly overstated demand projections; only one ever went briefly online, and the rest were mothballed, abandoned, or aborted after Bechtel and the like made off with billions in state funds.

This time, the giveaway is even more flagrant, since the federal government is proposing to take on all the risk without even participating in any of the potential upside like Dixy did; whatever fake “profits” the corporate welfare queen, in this case Southern Companies, makes by overcharging its customers for “new” nuclear power it will get to keep to buy lead-lined private planes, US Senators, and such.  Ain’t bipartisanship grand?

Had KGON not long ago been bought out by Clear Channel and vanished into prerecorded obscurity, they would undoubtedly be dusting off “Nukes in the News.”

UPDATE: Alert Hag reader Jebbie reports that one of the WPPSS plants is still operating, # 2.  What an interesting name.  A later google search also revealed that there were only 5 WPPSS plants, not seven.  CHNN regrets the error, and will fire whoever was responsible when the hangover wears off.

Dark Horizon

UPDATED BELOW:

I continue to be haunted by the right-wing BS I encountered at OregonLive yesterday, and the stunning success it represents in recruiting committed followers to some of the most reprehensible and elitist ideas ever conceived, all in the name of a twisted and yes, Hitlerian “populism.”  Reagan may have been a doddering old fool in many ways, but getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine was one of his masterstrokes, and its legacy poisons our politics, destroys the very concept of  e pluribus unum, and leaves us in the mess we find ourselves today.  No wonder crypto-fascists like Sean Hannity et al are so afraid it could return.  Because he and all of his ilk rely on a fact-free bubble of lies and smears for their political success, they recognize its demise as their very own Enabling Act, and its return would be their VE Day.

Right-wing radio and Fox News could not exist within the strictures of the Fairness Doctrine, and for good reason.  Americans saw the power to inoculate people to the most heinous and repressive of governments made possible by the media manipulations of Goebbels and Reifenstahl, and that immediacy and manipulative power of Radio and film were key to their rise to power.  Just like Hate Radio and FOX, the Nazis appealed to the darkest but most powerful and tribal elements of human nature… and found that lies, repeated often enough, were especially effective if they chose outsiders and minorities as scapegoats, and equated military conquest, violence, and racism with national pride and glory.  The Nuremberg Trials revealed how well evil could become banal, and accepted, if it was relentlessly touted through the media.  At the time, newspapers were still plentiful enough that with a few ownership restrictions might be left alone, but the limited spectrum of radio and television left America open to the fate of Germany in the 1930′s, and the Fairness Doctrine grew out of that understandable fear.  Big Brother wasn’t just a fantasy in those days, and it was well understood that opposing viewpoints were critical in keeping Big Brother away from a screen or speaker near you.

Just as those hard lessons of that moment in history were lost when Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, and an economic crash quickly and inevitably followed, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine led to the place we find ourselves in today.  Fascism is back, broadcasting 24/7, with the same nativism, bloodlust, worship of authority and military conquest, wrapped up, just as predicted, “wrapped in the flag and carrying a Cross.”

Then as now, economic hardship has turned Americans hard and vengeful, and Hitler’s old targets: unions, academics, gays, minorities, liberals, and more enlightened countries are trotted out to be flogged for the disaster.  Then as now, the wealthy, the well-connected, and the largest industries (not incidentally including the deregulated media) are happy to get on board.  And then as now, the goal is not to attempt to solve problems through dialogue and compromise, but to eliminate, by whatever means necessary, any and all dissent from the programs chosen by the amoral and self-serving elite.

I was in Journalism school in the early 80′s when the Fairness Doctrine was being discussed, and ironically, my professor, Lauren Kessler, didn’t see its demise as a bad thing.  In her liberal naivete, she mused that objectivity was unattainable anyway, so why not let journalists express their views in the open?  Just a few years after Watergate and the Church Commission hearings, she evidently thought that liberal ideas would win in the marketplace of ideas, so why not let a thousand flowers bloom?  I was inclined to agree, because I felt that Reagan’s destructive policies were being given undue credence because journalists had to present them alongside more sane proposals.  Neither of us saw that a lot of wealthy conservatives were poised and at the ready to “invest” in a big way in the media, to bend it to their will once and for all.  When the Fairness Doctrine finally fell, Rupert Murdoch and the people who would eventually build Clear Channel, Sinclair Broadcasting, and on and on, didn’t waste a moment, and the results will go down in the history books as an unmitigated triumph for the Right in selling, once again, its discredited ideas.

Thanks to the end of the Fairness Doctrine, racism is not only cool again, but has been redefined as an affliction only of uppity brown people.  Torture is back, and better than ever.  Rich people pay less taxes, and are even admired for their selfishness and greed.  War is accepted as a permanent state of affairs, with all its crippling costs and questionable aims.  Due process and fair trials are tossed aside as lightly as that Big Mac wrapper, and new, usually violent, pogroms against any dissenter, political or religious, are  dreamed up and sold like soap each day.  Working people’s wages and power have been systematically destroyed by the demonization of unions, and everything from schools to bridges are denounced as “socialist” intrusions on the “Free Market,” which is whatever the rich and powerful say it is.

None of this would have been conceivable just a few decades ago, and now, even a President of the nominally “liberal” party is powerless to reverse any of it.  Rest in peace, “Fairness Doctrine.”  You were our last chance, and we blew it.

UPDATE: I take no pleasure in announcing this, but as I predicted last week, we now have a centerfold teabagger in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.  Thanks for the bipartisanship, Obama.  I claim no clairvoyance, only that if a liberal utopian like myself doesn’t give a shit at this point, why should the denizens of the Bay State?  If Rahm, Geithner and Summers survive this, the Democratic party won’t.

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.

One of the funniest things about the right is that they never lose, even when they do, and they even have rather disturbing success convincing others, or at least the media, that this is so.  A lot of us, and certainly any trained psychiatrist, would look at their behavior each day, and think they were no more or less living in fantasy land than, say, Snoopy was when he battled the Red Baron on top of his doghouse; but continuing the Peanuts metaphor, the press reacts to these routine delusions like Charlie Brown does to Lucy holding the football.  The main difference is that Charlie Brown ends up on his back, humiliated, and our mainstream media keep their jobs, or even get better ones, so they can’t wait to kick again.  The New York Times never carried Charles M. Schulz’ iconic comic, preferring unfunny written versions on its op/ed page, although it’s considerably less entertaining, much less just, when their string of Charlie Browns always get awarded the field goal for the ball everyone can see Lucy is still holding over her shoulder.  The Republicans have noticed this phenomenon, and adapted to it predictably.

Usually, they can point to some to some fly in the ointment of the other side’s victory, no matter how microscopic, and failing that, they have a lot of ways to cheat, lie, and bloviate their way to some semblance of at least doubt that they did, in fact, lose again.  The fact that they lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, they ought to be by now a defeated and irrelevant minority in Congress, given their numbers, their leaders are all nincompoops, charlatans, and crazy people, none of whom can open their mouths without lying would, in a rational world, render them, well, not very interesting, at least as credible policy or political spokespeople.  But in our media landscape, lies are more interesting than truth, and crazy is much more interesting than sane, and they therefore continue to dominate public discourse, despite the fact that their policies, and even their people, are despised by a clear majority of Americans.  Ironically, that unpopularity plays to their psychological game; because they’re so vile, aggressive, and obvious about it, people do actually hate them, in addition to opposing them, in large numbers, so then these committed opponents of political correctness can cynically play the persecuted minority card and loudly cast themselves as oppressed and silenced victims.  Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?  Anyone with a pulse or grasp of the English language couldn’t bear to watch the guy for a lot of very good reasons, but somehow they were cast as deranged meanies who just hated Our Leader, as Bush coasted blithely from disaster to disaster, quite predictably but free of any “mainstream” criticism for eight years.

You have to hand it to them, really.  Anyone who can cast themselves, often successfully, as deserving of the Affirmative Action on steroids they routinely demand and receive from the media and on the political stage, when all they ever fight for is the prerogative of the majority race, religion, and sexual orientation to oppress those who don’t conform, they’re at least standouts for their chutzpah. Then, treating the superrich, enormous and monopolistic corporations, and their many media mouthpieces as beleaguered Davids fighting the liberal Goliath, if nothing else, shows admirable creativity.  But most of all, it shows that we no longer have politics in this country; we have a rigged reality show, and the fact that this makes many people disengaged, uninterested, and no longer interested in voting, rigs the game in their favor, yet again.  Low turnout and disengaged voters tends to make them lose by less, or even occasionally win.

The worst thing about all this, of course, is that every pile of shit presented to Republicans sends everyone from Sarah Palin and Micheal Steele to David Gregory and David Broder excitedly digging for a pony, and of course they always find it, even if the pony does smell a little funny and can’t exactly pull a cart.  Bush’s dubiously legal “landslide” in 2004, and the shameful, Delay-tainted “victory” in 2002, have become so defensively sanctified in the small, pampered minds of our media stars that they continue to pretend to forget everything that, well, actually happened, either before or since.  And since nothing really happened at all unless it got on television, and the only thing our media outlets do even vaguely competently is bury their mistakes, too many Americans fervently believe a whole lot of things that are either just dubious or more often plain, unmitigated bullshit.  As the supposed guardians of our First Amendment, Walter Cronkite pointed out in 2004 that the media, particularly FOX, whose audiences were the most misled, ought to be ashamed of themselves for such malpractice and its horrendous results.  But, alas, he made a lot less money than David Gregory, you know, and Rush Limbaugh’s maids, especially the ones who get drugs for him, probably make more, too.  Money talks these days, and even when it’s lying, we all are forced to listen.*

*Fairness Doctrine, anyone?  Liberal Portland has ONE progressive radio station, which calls itself that, and FOUR right-wing ones, that call themselves “News Talk.”  Most are owned by Clear Channel.  Must be the magical “free market,” again at work.

UPDATE: You can’t make this stuff up.  Before a cheering FOX host, the startlingly nebbishy Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explains that the real danger of Health Care Reform is that it might force insurance companies to sell a “50,000 dollar policy for (a mere) $10,000.”  France spends about half of what we do per capita on health insurance, but even here we don’t pay nearly that much for our inferior and selective care.  And, after he praised insurance companies for “saving more lives every day than Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi will in their entire lives,” he won the rhetorical point.  Talking, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, about $50,000 dollar medical insurance, would, you’d think, at least raise some eyebrows, and maybe want to at least be adjusted slightly for the talking points, at this politically sensitive time.  But not on FOX.  Lord, have mercy.

UPDATE II: Just when I thought these delusional righties couldn’t get any dumber, along comes this, and some of the chosen language sounds vaguely familiar..  Emphasis on the “liar.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. — Unknown

I‘m starting to think that one of the greatest dividing-lines of humanity is not the one between Republicans and Democrats, nor between rich and poor, labor and management — it’s the huge chasm separating those who live in reality, from those who don’t.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

There are two kinds of people in the political world. One side accepts as fact that human beings respond to incentives (seeking pleasure and avoiding pain); and the other side believes that good intentions will conquer history, psychology, economics and any amount of bad judgment. They will beat, or cheat, reality itself.

© Dan Popp

Have you ever heard such rubbish in all your life?  If you’re a regular Hag reader, I think you have.