Equally predictably, the media, in angelic harmony, waxed rhapsodic about this supposedly epoch-changing event as though it were anything more than the logical conclusion of the Citizens United decision, wherein corporations were allowed to openly buy the Congress, thus restoring the same thieving scumbags voters tossed out for their rank corruption and incompetence just two years ago.  Time and again, the laughably ridiculous notion that the “American People” had somehow demanded to sacrifice their well-being, health, and future to a bunch of bigoted, lying know-nothings who plan to rob them blind was repeated as though it were so by the pampered nitwits of the media.

It’s all eerily familiar, isn’t it?  The same bunch who compared George W. Bush to Winston Churchill when any fool could see he was closer to Colonel Klink, and showered hossanahs on David Petraeus for his “victories” in the costly and debilitating failures of Iraq and Afghanistan would naturally be inclined to see the elevation, via an unprecedented tsunami of secret corporate money, of a drunken sleazeball like John Boehner as yet another Great Moment in History.  It is, but not in the way they intend.  Don’t tell Chris Matthews, David Gregory, or Andrea Mitchell et al, but the Republicans discovered long ago that they couldn’t win elections honestly, so they’ve come up with a better idea, and it’s working, to a point.

After the chastening experience of 2000, when despite fawning coverage of the absurdly unqualified Bush and relentlessly brutal treatment of the only competent nominee, Al Gore, Republicans still lost the popular vote, they swung into action; starting wars, packing courts, and what have you, to create a “permanent”  (read: manufactured) majority for themselves.  Finally, with Citizens United under their belts thanks to two Supreme Court appointees willing to perjure themselves to get confirmed, Republicans thought they had found a way around the pesky obstacle of actually getting elected, repeatedly, regardless of performance.

Well, now it’s time to perform, and that’s always the sticky wicket.  Republican governance, after all, is always about looting the treasury to reward their benefactors at the expense of everyone else, and they’re victims of their own success at this rather expensive endeavor.  Even after he’s had a few, and his orange color starts to get tear-streaked, ol’ Boner still knows that the Military Industrial complex, the banksters, and Big Oil don’t like their welfare checks to bounce, so he’s already in a pickle with the teabaggers about raising the debt ceiling.  And there will be hell to pay amongst the geriatric, primary-voting Fox audience if Social Security and Medicare are cut, so he’s going to have to come up with an improbably large amount of money from what, the Forest Service?  It always seemed unlikely, at least to those of us not in the media.

What will happen, of course, is that the new Republican House, to steal another election, has written a whole lot of checks its benefactors won’t let it cash, so despite being sworn in, unprecedentedly, by our supposedly non-partisan Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John “balls and strikes” Roberts, this crowd will immediately revert to the ol’ Dick Cheney “deficits don’t matter” mantra faster  than Boehner can slam down a double scotch at last call, and Fox News will tie itself in knots trying to explain how this sudden turnaround is Necessary and Right.  Good luck with that.

Best of all, the media-created ticker tape parade for the Republicans has gotten so out of hand that the utterly bonkers Michele Bachmann is talking about running for President in 2012, and another selfless arbiter of Equal Justice, Antonin Scalia, has offered himself up to help that cuckoo back-bencher teach evidently benighted Americans about the Constitution.  It’s going to be an interesting two years at the rate we’re going, since regardless of politics, nobody likes a crying drunk, and now one is House Speaker.

Bring it on.

The outright lies are always a little riskier, but not by all that much.  Take, for example, the idea that our Wall Street fellating, oil-driller coddling, war escalating President Obama is, somehow in his heart of hearts, a Kenyan anti-colonialist.  Lots of people, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were unembarrassed to pretend they believed such garbage, but Forbes Magazine, quite understandably, took quite a bit of heat for publishing Dinesh D’Souza’s execrable and delusional cover “story” about how Obama’s  (unfortunately nonexistent) “anger” stems from the sinister influence of his father, whom he barely knew and quite clearly doesn’t come within a mile of emulating.  Though even some conservatives quietly distanced themselves from such baffling nonsense, the Fox-addled, who pride themselves on never reading such elitist (and wordy, too…) publications as Forbes, undoubtedly nodded their jowly heads in hearty approval.  Ditto the horseshit about FEMA Camps, gun confiscations, reparations, and on and on.  So a few cops got killed here and there; the rich got their tax cuts, which was the important thing, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

The conjectural lies are by far the bigger problem.  From Mushroom Clouds to World Government, these cannot ever be exposed for what they are because, well, you never know, and no one in the media has the common sense and professional standards to come right out and say that whatever drastic and stupid action Republicans are about to take is based upon pure fantasy of things that will never, ever, happen.  After all, it’s conjecturally (if not exactly theoretically) possible that global warming is a myth, low taxes on the rich create prosperity, and “small” government means spending a trillion a year on “National Security,” so why not let a bunch of Republican charlatans so obviously beholden to those who profit from such ridiculous notions repeatedly say so, unchallenged, on television each day?  Fox went to court in the 90′s and won a landmark case that established that knowingly lying to one’s audience was protected under the First Amendment, and after that, Republicans were off to the races, as we’ve seen.

The best kind of conjectural lies (from the Republicans’ standpoint), and the ones that inevitably turn out to be the most damaging to Americans, are the “Opposite Day” conjectural lies, because they’re front-loaded to put Democrats into their seemingly favorite political dilemma: heads we lose, tails Republicans win.  These tend to turn out predictably, as they did when Sarah Palin, defending the current Death Panelists of the health insurance industry, said Democrats, sometime in a future of her own imaging, would cut off care to the gravely ill the way for-profit insurance companies do every day, facts be damned, and it worked.  To this day, a substantial number of people still think we have the best  health care in the world, when we’re 37th, and spend more than anybody else.

Health Care Reform lies, of course, are relatively minor in their harmful effects compared to much more insidious opposite day lies like, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”  Ever since those words were so repeatedly uttered, the wars they credulously cheered on have, not for nothing, radicalized a generation of Muslims around the globe, just as surely as the first Gulf War radicalized Osama bin Laden, and the resulting deadly spiral of violence inexorably worsens year after bloody year.  Never mind that it was the peaceniks, the Unserious hippies and civil-liberties absolutists who dismissed such war-mongering xenophobia as the contemptible proto-fascism it was who were right in the end; no one remembers any such helpful facts because all of them, from Ashleigh Banfield to Phil Donahue, were summarily hounded off the airwaves by the end of 2003, only to return when it was far too late.

The mother of all opposite day conjectural lies, of course, is being rolled out as we speak, in part I think to cover up for the rest of them, which is that Julian Assange of Wikileaks has “blood on his hands.”    Like most opposite day lies, this one attempts to paper over its absurdity by choosing a person who can be conveniently demonized, rather than the less-refutable principle they stand for, because that’s a lot easier.  You know the drill:  if Michael Moore/Al Gore/Insert Truth Teller Here are for it, I’m agin’.   And just like any other under-60 male (older if you’re Republican) Assange does have a sex life, which must be ripe for exploitation in some way or other, at least  if nothing better comes up.  As usual, creating comic book villains beats coming up with arguments to refute them, and thus the bloodiest hands around are now feverishly clutching their pearls at the horror of it all.

Why things that haven’t and probably will never happen are to be feared and prevented at any cost, while things that are happening, every day, are dismissed as the errant rantings of people who just don’t know any better is a question our media ought to answer, but for obvious reasons, won’t.   No one could have predicted, we’ve heard ad nauseam, what actually happened, but yet they predicted, with disastrous consequences, a lot of things that didn’t, but well, you never know.  Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, but that’s still a considerably better record than most Republicans boast.

Someone ought to alert the media.

They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them.  Nolo contendre.

Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card wars, not torture, not tax policy, not social welfare policy, not massive fraud in the financial and mortgage markets, not massive (and up to now, largely unreported) deficits in state treasuries, not historic rot in the nation’s public infrastructure (no high speed rail in the US!), not a high school dropout rate at 30 or 40 percent (possibly higher), not a jobless rate at 10 percent (probably more than double that in real terms, and climbing) - nothing, not even a mild rebuke from one of their golden boys, David Brooks, will dissuade those representing the right from their catastrophically appointed rounds  – well what can a poor boy do?

Yet, there is perversity in this I think, real perversity in a moral sense, if one cares to look rather casually at the “tip of the spear,” where it seems the same ideology has appeared “in the heat of battle.”

DON’T HAVE TIME FOR TOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

Here is a tiny snippet which might show, in moral terms, what such hubris means to people we don’t even know.  Out there.  Over the horizon.  Out of sight and out of mind, well beyond the picket fences guarding our little castles in the shining city on a hill.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/03/wikileaks-u-s-ignored-british-concerns-over-secret-spy-flights-115875-22757887/

Oh never mind, children.  Nothing can be done, nothing can be corrected, no lives can be saved – anywhere in the world – until American tax policy is settled, to the satisfaction of the anointed ones in our midst.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#40500189

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.

Suddenly every right-wing think tank is casting about for new wars and the rich vein of taxpayer money that can be tapped with them; one day it’s the dangers of the new START treaty with Russia, the next it’s sticking it to the Chinese, and every so often, they reach for the real gold ring of full spectrum dominance, War with Iran.  They try to keep this on the down low, of course; one is reminded of the universally negative reaction to then-presidential candidate John McCain tonelessly croaking “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” before an addlepated, warmongering supporter in 2008.  Lindsay Graham, that pasty and effeminate Fox News “liberal” Republican, though, is finally coming out (no, not that way…), and just like in the disco song, he wants the world to know; he wants to let it show:  (h/t Raw Story for AFP article…)

The United States faces a possible war with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions and a “period of confrontation” with China over its currency, a top US lawmaker warned Saturday.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said his fellow conservatives, fresh from their historic elections romp this week, support “bold” action to deal with Iran.

Always watch out when Republicans propose something they call “bold.”  As we learned during the Bush years, “bold” tends to be synonymous with “stupid,”  which would be like, say, proposing to take on the Chinese while simultaneously asking them to finance another of our losing vanity wars, but no matter.  Lindsay goes on from there….

If President Barack Obama “decides to be tough with Iran beyond sanctions, I think he is going to feel a lot of Republican support for the idea that we cannot let Iran develop a nuclear weapon,” he told the Halifax International Security Forum.

It’s official.  The Republicans, who have jealously guarded made-up Executive Supremacy regarding foreign policy, feel that way only when they’re running it, and have thus, well, changed their minds about that now that Obama is President, which last time I checked, he still is.  Of course, Graham is also in the Senate, where he remains in the minority, and even the craziest teabaggers elected in the House largely avoided the subject in their campaigns, but these are Republicans, after all, and they just like wars, the more the better.  Never mind that the wars are about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse, to which Graham vaguely alludes, even as he dismisses such chickenhearted naivete:

“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran… Containment is off the table.”

According to Lindsay and his ilk, the “world” always “needs” us to keep bombing parts of it forever, even if it means we have to live like Somalians to pay for it.  He has no plans to participate personally, natch.

The South Carolina Republican saw the United States going to war with the Islamic republic “not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime.”

Now, if I were half as big of a fruitcake as Miss Graham, I wouldn’t run around tossing out the “n” word, but as you can see, the chickenhawks are on a roll here, and they’re throwing caution to the wind.  It’s as though they really want us to live like the Soviets did in the 70′s, sacrificing a decent standard of living for the Imperial pipe dreams of a bunch of discredited theorists who don’t give a tinker’s damn what happens to anyone but themselves and their cronies, and they think people will tolerate grinding austerity at home to pay for lavish misadvantures abroad, indefinitely.  Recent history, which includes the current cranking up of the Legacy Project with Bush’s inane and self-justifying “book,” certainly could lead to such bizarre delusions, but the military realities couldn’t be more clear.  As much as Americans seem to love war, we can’t afford any more of them, and we always lose, anyway.

If this is the Republican 2012 strategy, I would say “Bring it on,” but with the ever-capitulating Obama Administration, it just might work.

MCCONNELL: We need to be honest with the public. (CH:  That’d be a first….)  This election is about them, not us. ( By “us,” he means his own party, whose demented ideology happened to quite recently ruin the country…) And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: What’s the job?

MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

Well, then.  Basically, the Republicans plan to force the federal government into complete inaction for years until the American people give them back what they bizarrely but inalterably believe to be their own property, all three branches of government, and if a lot of people suffer in the meantime, tough shit.  The half or more of the country that thinks, rightly, that Republicans can’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag can just pound sand; they have a tantrum to throw, and it isn’t over yet. This morning Joe Scarborough called McConnell’s uncharacteristically honest words “pathetic,” but that’s something of an understatement, to my mind.   The uber-patriots of the right are going to punish America for rejecting them, a strategy that would result in restraining orders, were this a relationship, but naturally has strong appeal to the creepy authoritarianism of their “base.”  That their base is made up of the crazy and/or senile, and the candidates they’re offering are often even worse, make McConnell’s statement a little alarming.

Here we have, as usual, a mainstream Republican, in this case in line to be Senate Majority Leader, unable to accept the normal power-sharing democracy entails;  all Democratic governments are de facto illegitimate for them, since their ideology is such a delicate hothouse flower that the rest of the plants must be removed for it to bloom.  This is not news, but saying so is.  McConnell no longer even attempts to defend his party’s record, nor does he deign to say what, if anything, their plans are for the future; since Bush, Republicans operate in a world where nothing, nothing, is about anything other than winning power, and once they do, it’s nobody’s business what they do, forever and ever, Amen.  In short, Republicans are right about everything before they even know what it is, and they’re relying on Americans to accept that, if not with evidence, then with boatloads of shady, anonymous money spent smearing Democrats.

McConnell is only the most prominent of Republicans this season to flatly refuse to offer any possible solution to the nation’s many Republican-caused problems except electing more Republicans, which obviously will be a disaster in the real world, but it isn’t the real world they care about.  Across the country, the few Republican candidates who even bother to speak to the media at all only do so in calculatedly disingenuous platitudes, all of which somehow end up involving taking everybody’s money and giving it to rich people, who will surely not waste it on fripperies.  They don’t care about much but they do seem to care about one thing:  fooling enough people that with the usual electoral shenanigans, crooked elections officers, racist appeals, and whatnot, they can manage to get to that crucial 50% plus one that enabled them and their rich cronies to plunder the country before so they can do so again, and this time they have a Supreme Court raring to go, if only they can get that danged Darkie out before any of the righties tip over.  For McConnell and his ilk, Rove’s Permanent Majority still twinkles on the horizon to this day, and they don’t care what it takes to get it.

McConnell is just fed up with this whole Democracy business, ever since his party got tossed out for being, well, SOCIOPATHIC ASSHOLES among other things, and his solution for this is to be the biggest sociopathic asshole on the planet, and get votes that way.  Not the greatest plan, but if you’re McConnell, what are you going to run on, your looks?

Vote Nov. 2.

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.

The first casualty of Lieberman’s ineptitude and smarminess was Al Gore, who undoubtedly watched in horror as Lieberman not only threw the vice presidential debate, but in so doing managed to make Dick Cheney look principled and charismatic.  And we all know how that turned out.  Holy Joe then went from Fox News Democrat to “Independent,” to Republican to, well, what he is now, which is a foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing nutcase having circle jerks with Bill Kristol and Binjamin Netanyahu by the light of the Passover moon.

Unfortunately for poor Joe, his ego has been writing checks his body can’t cash for so long that he can only get on Fox when Karl Rove has the sniffles, so in a desperate bid for attention, this half-melted waxwork has to turn to Newsmax for a little love.  To wit:

“There were a lot of people, particularly Democrats, who were declaring after the 2008 election that we were beginning a period of Democratic dominance that would go on for decades,” Lieberman told Newsmax. “Now, all of a sudden, the momentum is with the Republicans. And that’s — thank God — that’s the way people have spoken, you know? That’s our democracy.”

Well, the same Democracy would have also tossed you out on your ass in 2006, Joe, had your state had “sore loser” laws, which it will probably enact forthwith.  Don’t thank God…  if He liked you he would have made you tall, handsome, and quite a bit less despicable.

The senator also said that “everybody should listen” to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Especially since she handily dethroned you as the worst VP candidate since Spiro Agnew.

“I think Sarah Palin for a lot of people has become a spokesperson,” Lieberman said. “People worried that government has forgotten them, has grown too big, that the deficit is growing too large, and in some sense that we’re not being as strong as we should be in the world — Governor Palin has spoken to those concerns as much as anyone.

Anyone on the nutcase right, indeed.  But no one vaguely connected with reality, of course.

“I do disagree with her on some of the specifics that she has said, but I think anybody who underestimates Sarah Palin as a political force in America does so at some peril, because she is speaking for a lot of people out there,” he continued. “I don’t know what her future is, but I’m just saying everybody should listen.”

Like they listen to you?  And where as that gotten anyone?

Lieberman was speaking in an interview that largely focused on US foreign policy regarding Israel and Iran. The onetime Democrat has repeatedly urged the US to take a hawkish position against Iranian development of nuclear weapons, and consider an armed airstrike to halt nuclear enrichment.

In other words, Lieberman thinks that the government still ought to get just a little bigger, spend a bit more, and forget the will of the people one more time, since they are clearly as tired of hearing about war as they are tired of paying for it, because ol’ Joe isn’t through turning America into a despised, bankrupt, war-depleted theocracy.  Maybe he’s angling for another chance at the VP slot, and he’s figuring that Palin is the only American stupid enough to pick him, which is undeniably true.

In that way, Joe Lieberman may have done us all a favor; no longer will Democrats be saddled with the feckless leadership of Harry Reid after 2010, and maybe the next guy (or gal) will be smart enough to start kicking worthless protoplasm like Lieberman to the curb when they have the chance.

The only real loser will be Hadassah, who will have to put up with Joe full time after 2012.

You’d think no one would still listen to Newt Gingrich, given that he predicted the collapse of the economy due to Clinton’s 1993 tax plan, and predicted a boom under Bush; we all know how that turned out.  But listen they do; everyone expects the Republicans to utterly deny the legitimacy of any Democratic government, and nothing they say in service of that accepted goal is considered to be too dumb, false, or hypocritical for public consumption.  Take Bill Kristol, please, who insisted that sectarian violence in Iraq was some kind of “pop psychology” liberal theory that would never happen, and now says, minus a necessary laugh track, that health care reform will inevitably lead to Republican triumphs.  Could anything be less valuable to the national conversation be imagined?  Well, yes.  They could put on a surly, drunken John Boehner to holler “Hell, no,”  and some other unintelligible drivel about Armageddon.  The reason, I think, that Republican craziness, lies, and stupidity are tolerated on television and newspapers is that nobody can find a Republican to spout anything else.

Ever since Watergate, Reaganomics, et al, Republicans decided that they no longer could sell any of their ideas honestly, so they completely set aside rational arguments and upfront advocacy for slogans, smears, dogwhistles, flim-flam, and Dark Predictions.  Even “Morning in America” hinted unsubtly at gloomy days ahead were the party in power tossed out, which was a neat way to distract attention from the deep recession caused by Reagan’s tax and spending policies that led to unemployment higher than today and and presidential approval ratings in the 30′s.  Morning didn’t turn out so bright afterward, either, when the stock market collapsed in 1987, the deregulated S &L’s vaporized, and the economy was still a mess when Bush pardoned all the Iran/Contra criminals on the way out the door.

I guess when your promises don’t turn out so great, it’s time to bring out the threats.  And, if you’ve already threatened economic catastrophe about a hundred times but are nonetheless responsible for the two largest ones in the past century, the upside is that the public is rightly scared of them, and will be inclined to be worried when you start ranting.  The same goes for terrorist attacks; if you ignored warnings and fumblingly mishandled the largest attacks in history, this sort of record could make you a potential Senior Terrorism Analyst, where you could gleefully gin up terror fears to your heart’s content, and not just on Fox, either.

I often complain that the media sit idly by and tolerate lies from the Republicans to be accepted as legitimate opinion, whatever it is they’re threatening on a given day, but maybe they aren’t to blame.  It is simply impossible to find a Republican whose record is unsullied by perpetual error, much less one who will tell the truth… about anything, and the media long ago stopped worrying about it.  The health care debate has been no different; it started and has ended with one party attempting to negotiate a policy, and the other party throwing a tantrum.  When the tantrum failed, the toddlers involved cursed and swore and called everybody poopyheads, and the media duly covered their tearful vows to take their toys and go play with their new friends, the teabaggers.   Poor Karl Rove hasn’t had such a meltdown since his “math” proved lacking in 2006 and 2008, a fact which naturally escaped the bobbleheads but surely not the audience.

More power to ‘em, I say.  If anyone can prevent the death of the Democrats in the next few elections it will be the repeated threats of discredited retreads like Kristol, Gingrich, Boehner, Rove, and the various Cheneys, along with the spectacle of dimwitted nutjobs like Palin, Bachmann,and Steele, attempting to dance on their graves.  If this is your Death Panel, you can probably look forward to a long and prosperous life.