Today’s example from The Oregonian is typical.  Vice President Joe Biden, in a Labor Day speech, declared that Republicans want to end Medicare, which or course they do, and all voted to do so just a few months ago.  The Ryan plan Biden quite specifically referenced would, for nakedly political purposes, exempt those Fox watchers 55 and over, so the VP did helpfully (and honestly) add, “in ten years.” Still, this wasn’t enough of a qualifier for Politifact.  The fact that Medicare is, by definition, a single payer, low overhead system of the sort enjoyed in the rest of the civilized world, while Ryan’s plan is more of the same waste-ridden, corrupt and ineffective thing we’ve got that costs twice as much with worse results, is never mentioned.  Worse, PolitiFact mendaciously adds, either out of ignorance or malice, that payouts under Ryan’s plan would “increase over time.”  Which they technically would, but, crucially, at the rate of general inflation, not at the rather more exponential rate of health care inflation, rendering a successful, universal, and guaranteed program a useless, probably means-tested, drop in the bucket in just a few decades.  It’s a Frank Luntz lie, and a well-crafted one, that calling something “Medicare” when it’s transparently no such thing, is OK as long as you’re still calling mailing out that same check to seniors to cover ever-rising premiums from the bloated, cutthroat insurance industry “Medicare.”  Given that logic, a rusting, stripped 1973 El Camino sitting on blocks outside a trailer, and a shiny late model Toyota Camry are both “cars,” to PolitiFact at least, so anybody who begs to differ must therefore be lying.  Behold:

Our ruling: (Which will be quite different from that of a sentient human)

Biden says Ryan’s plan “eliminates Medicare” in 10 years. In stating it that way in front of campaign donors, he strays from the “as we know it” qualifier even the president has used.

The bottom line is that all seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program’s budget would increase every year. The plan would reduce the growth in Medicare spending but not wipe out that spending. And current beneficiaries and those currently 55 and over would not be affected by the changes. It changes Medicare, dramatically, but does not eliminate it.

We rate Biden’s statement False.

Really?  Would that David Gregory or any other addlepated Villager would hold, say, Dick Cheney, to such an exacting standard of truth, and do so with such gusto.  Their whole argument is pure bullshit, and yet they’re sticking to it against all evidence and repeated statements by virtually all of the leading, teabagging Republicans, most of whom have relatively openly advocated abolishing the program entirely.  It’s as though the incessant moving of Overton’s Window that has been gradually accomplished by the far right through just this subterfuge  in recent years has completely passed these intrepid fact-finders by; had they a pulse they would know that Republicans have been gunning for Medicare since its inception and it’s clear that they’re finally moving in for the kill.  Anything that dares to call itself PolitiFact should be rightly embarrassed, and laughed out of town, when the Republicans inevitably do abolish Medicare, but they won’t be, you can bet.  After all, no one could have predicted….

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back when Bush was in office, stories like the one below fell like rain on virtually every subject, and always ended the same way; some branch or other of the government would just flatly declare that its past or current actions, no matter how heinous, simply aren’t anybody’s business.  It started with Cheney’s infamous energy policies, which we now know involved little things like invading Iraq and deregulating fracking.  As you’d expect, the stupider and more damaging the policy choice was, the more likely that it was to be implemented without any public debate at all; instead, narratives were chosen and relentlessly touted to either sell to or, more often, distract voters from, what was really going on.  Cheney famously said that elections are the only “accountability moment” for an administration; after that voters should just sit down and shut up.

Sadly, Obama behaves exactly the same way, which is more than a little disappointing considering that the guy was, well, elected to do just the opposite.  That ol’ “Constitutional Lawyer” was often trotted out, and spoke movingly and convincingly about the illegal activity and excessive secrecy that was threatening democracy.  His cowardly flip-flop on FISA, which happened before the election, was barely a taste of the outrages to follow, but it set the tone.  Accountability-free government, bloated, deceitful, overbearing, and corrupt, was firmly established as what you got from both parties, now, so I guess we should just get used to it. (from AP via the WaPoo…)

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos the George W. Bush administration used to justify his warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.

In responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the department is withholding two legal analyses by then-government lawyer John Yoo, and is revealing just eight sentences from a third Yoo memo dated Nov. 2, 2001. That memo is at least 21 pages long.

So there you have it.  One of the vilest and completely unpunished criminals from the Bush Administration, John Yoo, is being actively protected not just from his advocacy for torture, but also his advocacy of illegal, expensive, and ultimately useless warrantless searches.  Note how easily “warrantless” slips off the tongue these days, despite the explicit use of that word, right there in that “quaint” constitution of ours.  Having embraced approximately 94% of everything Yoo wrote, I suppose it’s natural for the “Justice” Department of a nominally “opposition” party to try to cover that up, like a cat in a litter box, but that makes it even more galling.

In this case as in so many others, Obama has proven himself to be much worse than Bush for the future of this country, because he has shown the American people that we really do have no choice anymore in how we are governed; the rightward march is on, and the elimination of civil liberties will continue to be ratified by all Presidents, regardless of party.  As Glenn Greenwald and others have noted in recent days, such a course is the grim necessity of a corrupt government that is steadily handing away its resources to the wealthiest and most well-connected; as inequality skyrockets and more and more working people fall into poverty and hopelessness, an up-and-running police state is a handy thing to have lying around.

Lefty film director Ken Loach, in a recent interview with The Guardian, put it best when he said, “The ruling class are cracking the whip.”   I’ll say.  To quote a less respectable analyst, “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya?”

As though it weren’t enough that the American people have been forced to endure, post 2010, the worst episode of delusional Republican overreach since, well, the last time Presidential candidate (!) Newt Gingrich was in the news, this motley bunch of walking disasters have decided that everything Bush did was pure genius, and they’re loudly proclaiming this errant nonsense to a public which may be forgetful, but doesn’t have the late-stage Alzheimer’s required to swallow such horseshit.  To their addled minds, Americans ought to be proud of Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and tax cuts for the rich, forever.  Worse, they should surely thrill at the deceptive and questionable legal means necessary to achieve such murky, elitist goals in every state, not just in faraway Washington.

Like the craziest right-wingers of old who mistrusted Nixon until Watergate, a group determined by Bob Altemeyer’s exhaustive examination of right-wing authoritarianism to be a reliable quarter or so of the population, today’s mainstream Republicans just glory in the idea of taking up unpopular causes against the will of clear majorities, just for the joy of getting their way.  The more people they piss off, the better.  Such a strategy does wonders with the Fox News BarcaLounger set, but it obviously must also entail a lot of expensive and politically tricky misinformation, disenfranchisement, bribery, and myriad other unconstitutional behavior, since so few support the policies they want.  So far, they’ve been equal to the challenge; since the first post-Citizens (!) United election last November, all the KOCH-purchased states have quickly moved not just to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning groups, but have also moved aggressively against Democrats’ erstwhile funders while lavishing their own with government booty.  (Not that kind of booty, openly anyway, but I’m sure it’s involved, too…)

Basically, they’re admitting that they wouldn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning if they had to play the game honestly, so they’re choosing the Rove/Bush playbook instead, since it’s all they have, but luckily, a lot of people still remember how things turned out with Bush and Rove.  Few of the much-discussed but seldom seen “Independents” recall all of the outrages of the Bush years, hence their nutty and stupid votes in 2004, but they do know that something went horribly wrong during 2001-2009, and that Condi, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were clearly a part of it, as well as a power-grabbing, domineering executive branch that routinely treated overwhelmingly negative public opinion with a dismissive, “so what?”

We now have half a dozen states run by people that looked at the abysmal record of George W. Bush and decided that he wasn’t bold enough in ruining the country economically, socially, and morally, because he was too accommodating of his many opponents.  Basically we have a bunch of Fascist nutcases flexing their muscles who make The Decider look like Ghandi, so the media’s gotten suddenly nostalgic for the “adults” who worked for him, and started trotting them out to defend (lamely) his most revolting policies.  While this blatant journalistic failure does conveniently if momentarily  take the spotlight off of the most despised newly elected Republicans and their hijinks, it can only remind voters of the utter catastrophe of the Bush years, and its disturbingly mendacious and authoritarian tactics.

Good luck with that.  Maybe this proves once and for all that media really is liberal, and thus is cleverly playing eleven dimensional chess, but I doubt it.  They’re just dumb.

Think about that.  I know I’ve told this story before, but when my brother was born his scalp hadn’t closed, but the doctors were able to peer into his brain and thus assure my mother that, yes, he could be President some day.  ”That was before Ronald Reagan,” my German friend told me, “I bet they don’t say that anymore.”  Nixon required all the PR efforts of no less than Fox News’ Roger Ailes to make him seem likable enough to be elected, but even his many detractors never thought he was stupid, just icky.  Reagan, on the other hand, was generally liked, but thought (not entirely correctly) to be a lightweight.  His handlers, to whom he was merely a means to an end, didn’t care.  They knew that none of their plans could be accomplished by appealing to anybody’s intellect, unless they were wealthy, so they went forth to find out where dumber Americans could be peeled off from the Democrats.

Nixon had already blazed this trail with his Southern Strategy, a cynical attempt to exploit racial resentments for political gain among the white working classes in the south and middle America, and Reagan’s team spotted another rich vein of all-American slack-jawedness in the then-nascent “Christian” Right.  All these years later, we now have a black president, abortion is still legal, and gay marriage is on the cusp of becoming reality, but nonetheless the Republican Party, which remains devoted as ever to the wishes of the malefactors of great wealth, has been miraculously recast as the party of the “little guy” while racking up such populist triumphs as ever lower taxes on the rich, ever fewer regulations on larcenous banks, and further environmental degradation.  It was a neat trick, but let’s just say its stunning success started thinning the blood flow to the brain amongst its officeholders, as we now clearly see with Governor Walker.

By creating the alternate reality of its own media and “think” tanks, the right no longer has to worry as much about constantly being proved not only wrong, but dishonest, but it’s now become a victim of its own success. Once you’ve relentlessly exalted your bumbling string of standard-bearers for “achievements” like firing 11,000 air traffic controllers, barfing on the Japanese Prime Minister, allowing the country to be attacked by terrorists then losing two wars, busting the budget, or what have you, who can blame, say, Sarah Palin for thinking she might one day end up on Mt. Rushmore?  Like Walker, Palin is the product of an era where “don’t confuse me with the facts” is no longer a punch line, but a way of life.

The right has been so successful in drowning out inconvenient facts over the years that its younger “stars,” and I use the term rather loosely, are as bone-headed and clueless as the rubes they’re sent out to hoodwink.  Dick Cheney may have demanded that all TV’s be tuned to Fox before his arrival, but he knew better than to believe any of it.  He watched in the way a director might attend his own play again near the end of the run, to look for little errors in presentation, certainly not to learn anything.  He also didn’t jabber away to random phone callers in his undisclosed location; he didn’t even use email.

At the top, those on the right know that everything they say in public is essentially the opposite of the truth, and are as such compelled to at least periodically peek outside the bubble, if only to check whether the lie of the day is still going over.  Lower down the food chain, such pointy-headed thoroughness is now seen as a sign of weakness.  In Walker’s Fox-addled world, the protesters are “almost all” from out of state, and busting unions will surely get his name on an airport someday; if Sean Hannity says so it must be true.  Good luck with that, Scooter.

You see, Rand and his ilk pushed forward by the right-wing money machine were never intended to dilute any of the dictatorial powers seized by Bush; given the rather radical wealth transfers this bunch had in mind, becoming a police state was just an unavoidable cost of doing business that would assuredly come in handy later, when the shit hit the fan, as it undoubtedly has.  From its inception on K Street, the Tea Party was never anything more than a quickly-concocted re-branding effort to dupe the rubes for the hundredth time, and at least at first, it worked.  Unfortunately for its creators though, the reliable authoritarians like Joe Miller of Alaska, famous for detaining journalists, Christine O’Donnell of Delaware, famous for opposing sex, especially for others, and Sharron Angle, famous for being a bigoted nincompoop, all lost.  The ones who won are something of a mixed bag, that is if your model of government is, as it is for most establishment Republicans, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.

Tellingly, Paul, in his speech above (culled from his own youtube channel…) was at pains to point out that there were several other amendments in the Bill of Rights, besides just the all-hallowed Second, and some of those might require at least a look-see every so often.  That part probably went over like a fart in church at Dick Cheney’s house, and best of all, it was intended to.  A respectable 26 other Republicans joined 2/3 of Democrats and voted with Paul not to renew the so-called Patriot Act’s most repressive provisions, but I’m betting none of them took to the intertubes to publicize it.

Admittedly, lil’ Rand looks a bit silly in his mock turtle getup standing before crappy scenery, but what he had to say was braver and (gasp) smarter than anything I’ve heard from almost anyone from either party, since 9/11 “changed everything” so much for the worse.  If kooky teabaggers are the only thing standing between us and the new bipartisan “consensus” in favor of unaccountable executive power and the authoritarianism it inevitably produces, I’m all for it.  And if Rand Paul is the only one speaking up, I’ll take him, albeit reluctantly and wearing a blindfold.  (And earplugs, if he’s a talker….  that voice is too much.)  Politics indeed makes strange bedfellows…

In today’s LA Times, David Eisenhower typed up a little something that shows pretty starkly that if one wants to maintain one’s grasp on reality over time, then marrying into the Nixon family might be a mistake.  The piece (of what, I’ll let the reader decide), is a rather boring, phoned-in paean to something called “civility,” which seems disturbingly popular these days.  (Not civility itself, of course, but the word, especially with Democrats, whose unerring and self-defeating civility just cost them the House.)  He longs for that imagined past, wherein both victorious Generals like his father and commie whoremongers like John F. Kennedy were considered Good Americans, despite their differences.  The not-insignificant difference that in the end, Kennedy was rather quickly assassinated, while David’s father lived to play golf for several more years after two terms in office has evidently slipped his mind.   Memory loss of this sort is understandably an adaptive quality for Mr. Julie Nixon, and he’s really letting it show here.  (Those rolling pins do hurt…)   Marvel, if you will:  (There’s more, but I’m sparing Hag readers the dreary task of reading it all….)

On Jan. 17, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a historic farewell address, followed on Jan. 20 by President John F. Kennedy’s storied inaugural address. These two speeches, delivered by political opponents, offer obvious contrasts in style and political philosophy. But the addresses converged on key points, namely on questions of citizenship in the modern age and on the belief that the American system of self-government can rise to any challenge.

This historical oddity that Eisenhower perceives, however dimly, is that back in the day, nobody thought Social Security was a “Ponzi Scheme,” McCarthy and his demonizing tactics had been vanquished and discredited, and rich people were taxed at a top rate of 91%, even under the Presidency of his Republican dad.  Times have changed a bit, haven’t they?  Further, Eisenhower failed to notice that the same kind of unhinged, violent rhetoric we hear today would soon target Kennedy, figuratively at first, but later kind of literally.  He was a n*gger-loving Communist, he was part of a Papal conspiracy, and on and on.  Furthermore, a substantial chunk of the opposition party doesn’t believe that the current President even is a citizen.  Honestly, David, I’m beginning to suspect that your news consumption, then and now, must rival Sarah Palin’s.

Both speeches continue to fascinate. Fifty years on, Eisenhower’s famous warnings still seem prophetic. He warned that the American democratic process could be undermined by the “unwarranted acquisition of influence … by a military-industrial complex” and that public policy could fall captive to domination by a scientific-technological elite. In 2011, the threat remains, but the military-industrial complex of which he candidly spoke is relatively smaller (in terms of GDP). And since 1961, the political branches, perhaps heeding his warnings, have retained control over the Pentagon and military policy.

Generalissimo Petraeus would be surprised to hear that, as would Dick Cheney; they’d also be pretty disappointed too, as members in good standing of the only Reality-Based Community that matters, the Pentagon.  I don’t know where he gets his figures, since military spending in 1961 by almost every measure took a much smaller bite out of the budget than it does now, and every President, including “Democrats” like Clinton, Carter, and Bush, have supinely deferred to the military brass on matters of both budget and policy ever since.  But do go on, David;  despite your blandness and wooden prose, this is getting as interesting as a rant about family scandals from a drunken uncle at Christmas.

Likewise, Kennedy’s vision of a “peaceful revolution of hope” continues to galvanize efforts to overcome poverty and encourage wise development at home and abroad, as do his memorable words about the social responsibilities inherent in a free and just society. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,” Kennedy declared, “it cannot save the few who are rich.”

Alright, that does it.  HOW can any sentient primate be so clueless to imply, even vaguely, that Kennedy’s vision of social justice has somehow prevailed, in a country where the ascendent faction in the house thinks Jesus would have wanted sick children to just die if they have some “preexisting condition” or the other?  Or that unemployment insurance, and essential countercyclical tool the government has routinely used since before World War II to counter downturns, is “unconstitutional?”  More hilariously, just a couple weeks after the Republicans vowed to punish the whole world if they couldn’t get the richest “few” relieved from a 4% tax increase amid crushing deficits, Eisenhower couldn’t manage to Google thoroughly enough to find a quote less snicker-inducing than that?  For Pete’s sake.

And “wise development at home and abroad?”  Has the guy not read about Baghdad, Fallujah, and Kandahar?  Or more locally, Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, St. Louis?  These days, we do un-development.  We’re #1 in that, anyway.

The historical blinders required to see these two historical moments as both similar and different as they are, but for what amounts to the opposite of the real reasons, must have come in handy all these years for a guy who, before he needed reading glasses, thought it would be a good idea to marry Julie Nixon.  Days before President Nixon resigned, poor David was overruled by his bride, and glumly acquiesced to the “Loyal Nixies” Quixotic attempt to “continue the fight,” and look how that turned out.  Double-crossed and outsmarted by is sleazeball father-in-law, he’d been rightly consigned to history’s dustbin, but evidently not by the LA Times, who have  now trotted him out of deserved obscurity to comment, pathetically, on the SOTU this evening.  I guess Jonah Goldberg was busy.

UPDATE: As commenter Retzilian notes, ol’ David is the Grandson, not son, of Ike and Mamie. CHNN regrets the error, but reserves the right to make more in the future.

To no one’s surprise, Holy Joe Lieberman’s “Joementum”  has turned out, once and for all, to be a wet firecracker; the universally despised “Independent” has, somewhat belatedly, decided to pull the curtain on his embarrassing “career,” by, naturally, leaking the news of his retirement while denying it.  Of course, few of his constituents will miss him, but Fox News will, and so will I, but for the same selfish reasons that have nothing to do with being a Patriotic American.  What right-wing network could fail to miss a “Democrat” who has come to dedicate his dreary, venal life to vilifying other Democrats, and what lefty blogger wouldn’t shed a drunken tear or two at the thought of losing such an easy (and cartoonish, to boot) target on a slow news day.

As most Hag readers know, I come by my loathing of Joe Lieberman honestly, despite its undeniable advantages; the moment he stepped up to denounce Bill Clinton for his notorious but obviously irrelevant tart problems, he gained a place in my heart as not only the Senate’s Dumbest Democrat, but as the Senate’s Dumbest Politician, which is a considerably higher bar to clear.  The rest of them were all porking their subordinates, too, and therefore understandably wanted to focus, primly, on “the rule of law” and whatnot, but ol’ Holy Joe, with whom no woman, likely including his long-suffering wife, has ever willingly disrobed, chose to focus on the sex thing; just the sheer horror of it all.  He positively gloried in being  Ken Starr’s homelier twin, and we all know how that turned out when it was presented to the American people, nearly all of whom have gotten laid, deservedly, considerably more often than guys like Ken and Joe, and as such see things a bit differently.

But like the party he would soon embrace, the unappealing and schoolmarmish Holy Joe fell improbably upward after the Democratic rout of 1998, and over the years he got to like the treachery thing a little too much for even his own good.  His nomination as Vice President in 2000 probably sealed Al Gore’s political fate, just as surely as Sarah Palin’s sealed John McCain’s eight years later, but neither of these two fatal and tone-deaf choices ever blamed themselves; quite the opposite, to the continuing consternation (and, I might add, diminution) of their disappointed political benefactors.  But Holy Joe wasn’t done.  His heretofore dormant libido having been put in overdrive after making out with George Bush, he decided to go bareback with Dick Cheney and Bill O’Reilly, rather than get thee to the STD clinic like a more responsible whore would, and his infections predictably blossomed.

Soon, he was beaten in the Democratic Primary (thanks in part to donations from your humble correspondent) by political newcomer Ned Lamont, and quickly became the embodiment of everything that was wrong with not just the Democratic Party, but the country at large, by running as an “Independent.”   You see, in today’s world, an “Independent” means that you emphatically embrace the most bonkers and ruinous policies of the Republican Party, especially on war an tax cuts for the rich, but even on things like reproductive rights (of which Joe would know nothing), and Health Care, which, thanks to Joe, includes no public option and is thus, (with a couple of minor exceptions) a typical pile of corporate-vetted crap.  This strategy, in the old days, could make you so rich even Republicans couldn’t beat you, but thanks to his old boyfriend’s court appointments, oops, Citizens United came along, and suddenly there’s many millions of dollars that says ol’ Holy Joe is just a shorter, uglier version of Hugo Chavez.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Holy Joe has indeed done a lot in his career, but today he has, at long last, finally done something worthwhile.  Quit.  Thanks, Joe.

.

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.

What’s undoubtedly lost on the Fox viewer, of course, is that Dick, personally, did do extremely well by the war and tax policies he embraced and rammed through, even if the rest of America certainly didn’t, so for a change he isn’t lying this time.  In Fox World, anything liberals don’t like is by definition all but Heaven-sent, so even the worst policies, the catastrophic consequences of which still dominate the news today, are treated as great triumphs, niggling things like anemic job growth, stagnant GDP, and unemployment in the Bush era are mere collateral damage in the ongoing war Fox valiantly fights each day.  That’s at least one war Dick can rightly feel he’s won, which is (not coincidentally) the whole point of this supposed “documentary.”   This is Fox, after all, and therefore every story, even the most trifling ones about animals and/or boobs, are always ultimately about the triumph of godly conservatism over perfidious liberalism.  You just fill in new names and datelines, and away you go; evidently  this slapdash formula works just as well when you have months to produce your propaganda, since your well-conditioned audience isn’t exactly, uh, skeptical, except perhaps of Al Gore.

You’d think this would get boring after a while, except for late-stage Alzheimer’s patients, that is, but it apparently never does.  ”The Simpsons,” a rogue planet in the Fox Universe, upped the ante this week by calling the “news” network “unsuitable for viewers under 75,” but count on Bill O’Reilly not to get the joke, since his absurd salary demands it.  Similarly, last week O’Reilly made an utter fool of himself attempting to defend his employer when “The Simpsons”  added a tagline under the Fox News logo, “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists,” even though just a few years ago 50-something Bill described, with genuine surprise, his decidedly un-scary first foray into a predominantly black restaurant, and he routinely defends his obnoxious bigotry and bad behavior by smugly pointing to his ratings.   Bully and authoritarian that he is, he advocated harsh, Murdochian punishment for “Simpsons” creator (and Portland native!) Matt Groening, rather than deigning to address Groening’s completely uncontroversial claim.

Clearly, Fox has long since sailed too far down Fair and Balanced river and is now careening over Don’t Confuse Me With The Facts Falls, to inexorably land in the bottom of Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard Canyon, where it disappears like Wile E. Coyote, in an unheralded and failure-tainted puff of smoke.  And just like Daisy Buchanan, Dick Cheney roars away in his blood-splattered Deusenberg (the Roaring Twenties equivalent of a Hummer), laughing all the way to the bank, while Fox cheers him on.  In more capable hands, this could be quite a “documentary,” indeed; it was a great novel, albeit still unsuitable for readers under 75.