Just as Reagan taught the Republicans that (their) deficits “don’t matter,” Bush taught us, repeatedly, that failure also doesn’t matter.  Granted, you might need to start a well-timed war, capitalize on a terrorist attack you failed to prevent, get a leg up from the Supreme Court, work the US Attorneys into doing some voter supression and whatnot, but getting 50% + 1, as Tom Delay liked to call it, simply does not constitute a wave.  (Why Republican would even use the word “wave” is yet another mystery:  all the waves I see these days have oil in them…)  It’s official: Republicans have finally untethered performance from electoral success, but have American voters, really?

No one ever went down to defeat betting against the amnesia of the media, but a large number of Americans do remember what happened last week, last month, or even ten years ago, and to them Michele Bachmann’s vengeful rantings about taking down a Democratic President by taking back the House sound both deranged and drearily familiar.  The Temper Tantrum Party of the Gingrich years is clawing to get back to do the same old thing, and “Independents” are supposed to find such a prospect appealing and vote for them in record numbers.  There are reasons to doubt this.

Remember, Bush’s squeaker elections were not only shakily achieved, they were also deliberately deceptive: he didn’t come out and say he was going to bankrupt the country, start and lose a war or two, get rid of Social Security, and all that.  He was a “Compassionate Conservative” who would follow a “humble” foreign policy, and “give back the surplus” to taxpaying Americans.  In short, he had the good sense to lie.  Not so the Teabag-Americans of 2010.  Even as Michele Bachmann promises her investigations, Sen John Kyl announces that thirty billion for the unemployed would have to be scrapped to pay for $700 billion for the rich, and George Steinbrenner dies and leaves his multibillion dollar estate untaxed.  In other words, several more lies of the Bush Administration are exploding before our eyes, mainly the budget trickery that led to the sudden “expiration” of his ruinous tax cuts on the wealthy, and Republicans think they can make lemonade out of these lemons.  Good luck with that.

At least Sharron Angle has gotten with the program, and now denies that she ever said people needed to be “weaned” off Social Security, which of course is a lie, but at least a smart one.  Rand Paul just stopped talking altogether, and here in Oregon, free-throw champ Chris Dudley even ducked out of the traditional meeting with state newspaper publishers for a well-timed “family vacation” that happened to include a speech at the Republican Governor’s Association, in which he aspires to be a member.  Sarah Palin, whose half term compares favorably with Dudley’s none has gone ahead and, you know, while Marco Rubio has started a war with Rachel Maddow.  Is any of this wave-riding behavior?  Deliberate vagueness about governing priorities as an announced and obviously observed campaign strategy, of course, is the same tacit admission of unpopularity Republicans adopted long ago, since kleptocratic oligarchy has never polled too well, but this time it seems that the cat has even gotten Frank Luntz’s tongue.  When they aren’t lying, Republicans are simply clamming up, hoping to just ride the “wave” of their own fantasies back to the glory days of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay.  ”Cowabunga,” says the media.  I’m not so sure.

It happened again during the health care debate;  just as Republicans were darkly evoking government takeovers, death panels and such, the insurance monopolies went ahead and raised rates 20-40% on all their customers and then quite publicly dropped some ailing customers, showing everybody the Free Market and death panel thing, Republican style.  Suddenly even the Democrats’  crummy shambles of a plan looked pretty good, if only by comparison.  Calling  any Wall Street Reform another “bailout?”  Great idea, Luntz, but too bad Goldman Sachs’ unbelievably revolting swindles and $5 billion in bonuses had to both blow wide open as soon as Mitch McConnell opened his lying mouth…..  The credibility bank was again seriously overdrawn, and even the infuriatingly reticent President Obama couldn’t help but almost laughingly call out the lies as soon as they were uttered.  Again, no credit to Democrats, only to Republican policy so horrible that it produces such large and damaging revelations every day of the week that they can no longer be treated as, say, weather, even by our somewhat inadequate news media and our relentlessly forward-looking politicians.

Basically, it’s getting so disasters can almost be predicted by whatever Republicans are most maniacally bleating about in a given week, at least by caregory….  As soon as the first Luntz-generated pro-industry smears were being trotted out about the upcoming climate legislation, 29 miners were killed by unconscionable safety violations at a coal mine owned by a FOX-addled, anti-union, teabagging wingnut, a Chinese freighter crashed into the Great Barrier Reef  and befouled it with oil, and a derrick off Louisiana exploded and collapsed, killing several and spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  What’s next?  A nuclear meltdown?   (Well, pretty close…)  A pipeline explosion?  (Well, er, yes…)  Another fish kill?  (Yes, if they get their way…)  Please, Republicans, could you talk about something else?  At least for Earth Day….

Republicans once again are victims of their own success; they got what they wanted, and now we can’t help but see the horrifying results every day, which does prove problematic whenever they try to sell more of the same.   They’re down to predicting ever more unlikely disasters as a result of their political opposition, but even if they all came true, they’d still be way ahead of any Democrat in the disaster department.

There are just too many piles lying around not to step in one.  Oops.

Of course, the predetermined Beck/Teabagger memes will have to be used; Socialism, Death Panels, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Government Takeovers, blah, blah, blah.   It would be inconvenient, you’d think then, that the Republican “Road Map,” as it were, presented by the naively direct Wisconsin wingnut Paul Ryan, has a whole lot of socialism in it (for rich people, natch), envisions steadily increasing Medicare cuts which will undoubtedly cause premature deaths, incorporates the worst aspects of both Hitler’s and Wilson’s “Internationalism,” and takes the most popular and enduring “Government Takeover” in US history, Social Security, and hands it over to Wall Street.  You’d be wrong.  For Republicans and their fawning cheerleaders in the media, down is up if Jim DeMint says so and FOX News unsurprisingly agrees.

The tinny Victrola of terrorism is of course going to be cranked up anew, to play scratchy recordings of 2002-2003 and somehow claim that we’re not clobbering the Constitution fast enough, not torturing people with sufficient eagerness, and not invading enough countries to Keep America Safe.  This angle may be dropped later because in early rollouts it only fooled Richard Cohen, a feat akin to convincing Tom Friedman that Lexuses are preferable to olive trees.  You heard it here at CHNN first, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the terror well will finally be recognized (by the voters, not the media…) as having run inconveniently dry in a country with 10% unemployment and an economy still collapsing.  Please make a note of it, Rudy.

Of course, the real power behind the GOP, money, has already set the stage, and as such one can expect a lot more unnatural couplings between square pegs and round holes to ensue.  The way to “create jobs” is to abandon environmental regulation, any vestigial remains of progressive taxation, and give more tax-free money to worthless heirs and heiresses.  Neither remarkably nor evidently as a joke, the strikingly unattractive and almost as untalented version of Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes, has a new book out, not entitled “I Got Mine, Fuck You,” but might as well have been, to emphasize these not very new ideas.  Frank Luntz has almost just absentmindedly trotted out the same old anti-government crap that was so successful in perpetuating our third-world health statistics for another decade or three, to stop desperately needed banking reform,  but will people really fall for the notion that Wall Street banks that every day continue to rob Americans blind ought not be regulated?  That’s some pretty heavy lifting, even for the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

As they always do when they’re in a pickle, the GOP is making a lot of noise about teh ghey, this time about the long-overdue abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy so ridiculous on its face that I have trouble believing it’s been the law of the land for almost eighteen years, and touting the purported “uprising” against marriage equality, financed by a bunch of wealthy churches whose primary concern is avoiding reality, even when it drops on their curiously adorned heads.  But time has shown that since the cynical 2004 “victories” that resulted from gay-bashing have only driven more younger voters away from the GOP, and even if John McCain doesn’t listen to Cindy and Megan, America does, and has.

They think, of course, that they have a new big thing in the Teabaggers, which is the first sign of actual non-astroturf political activity on the right since Tomothy McVeigh, and they understandably don’t want to waste a development like that .  Sarah Palin surely didn’t…  she got half a wardrobe’s worth of Teabagger dough for mouthing vaguely intelligible Randian Haiku in Nashville, just tonight, so I’ll bet she’ll be wearing something extra pretty for the occasion.  Still, given that even some of the craziest Republicans, Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, finally slinked away from the teabaggers, realizing they were already so bought and paid for by Wall Street and the real corporate Death Panelists in the Health “industry” that they might not have much in common with the teabaggers after all. Rotten vegetables are notoriously unflattering to the complexion.   Naturally, they both disingenuously blamed the annoying “big government” intrusion of pesky “ethics” laws for their fortuitous absences from a crowd that in the end, evidently didn’t “share their values.”

No wonder Sarah Palin quit her part-time day job; this evolution-denier can gaily fleece her (socially) Darwinistic inferiors for all they’re worth and not be unduly shackled by silly old “big government” ethics.  The Republican Party, not so much.  The policies they have chosen and continue to fight for are the exact ones that caused and will only merrily perpetuate the very pain the Teabaggers are feeling, and their overconfident claim to Teabagger loyalty is already wearing alarmingly thin, given that their craven, almost Cheneyesque money-grubbing went on lurid display at about week three of their “revolution’s” existence.

I have previously criticized the Democrats for running against Bush, after  all this time and so many of their own failures, but the only thing stupider than that would be the Republicans running as “Bush, Only More So.”  I can’t decide which one I want to lose more.  Let the (h/t Jon Stewart) “thinnest kid at fat camp” win.

Despite these obstacles, however, and because the situation seems to have gotten immeasurably worse over time, it’s both tempting and easy to dive in, since the more cuckoo the right gets and the more often they’re defending the indefensible, the more rote and demented their declarations become.  Indeed, the lack of media diversity they so maniacally defend has, paradoxically, made this strategy so much more transparent and even less convincing, such that it deserves some examination; their arguments, using that word with undue generosity, collapse under the lightest scrutiny, leaving one to conclude that they’re only designed to “convince” utter nincompoops like themselves.  Guys, could you please get about three more people to help think up your material?  This is getting kind of boring.

The health care debate is a vivid example: unable to defend the current system, the “thinkers” on the right have come up with some sound bites so pathetic and easily refutable that I kind of feel sorry for the addlepated automatons who think they’ve latched upon such world-beating winners that they repeatedly call in to even liberal talk shows to mouth them, for what they evidently think is the first time, to an audience they assume just needs to be set straight, once and for all.  Too often, the hosts waste their time treating such redundant piffle with respect it simply doesn’t deserve, and bother to try to refute it while the caller keeps plugging his (nearly always male) ears and loudly singing “Frere Jacques.”

“Medicare’s  bankrupt, Social Security’s bankrupt, and so’s the Post Office; why would you want the Government running health care?”

First of all, so is everybody, thanks to the ruinous economic policies of the Bush Administration, whose very existence has suddenly been neatly excised from history.  No matter.  Secondly, the bankrupting of Medicare and Social Security were by design, the looting of the treasury and the ruinous giveaway of Medicare Part D were, back in the day, some of Bush’s most famously trumpeted “successes.”  The “reforms” once proposed for the Post Office by Bush: raising executive salaries and lowering them for everyone else, were never enacted, but having the top people flying around in private jets to their multiple vacation homes while letter carriers collected food stamps seems unlikely to have alleviated the huge drops in revenue precipitated by the Bush Recession.  Dumber still, this self-contradictory statement overlooks the fact that overhead is 3% with Medicare, and upwards of 25% for the private health “industry.”  It’s really rather astonishing that people who would proudly recite such an absurd argument on national radio are nonetheless smart enough to tune in a radio and dial a telephone, and in that order, to boot.

“Canadians come here for their health care.”

Aside from being utterly false, this one is particularly audacious.  As anyone with a passing acquaintance with our health care system knows, much of the time, employees, and even square footage of any hospital in the US is devoted to bilking the ill out of their money; unless these invented Canadians are wanting to improve their penmanship and dispose of their estates before their greedy heirs get their paws on them, none of them would be dumb enough to try such a thing.  Worse, no one is proposing such a rational, cheap, and humane system as Canada has here, so even if the argument weren’t pure hogwash, it’s still irrelevant.

Why should I pay for some (worthless, brown, fat) person’s health care, if they won’t pay for it themselves?

This one, admittedly, isn’t really meant to be an argument, but merely a plea to the racists to take one for the plutocrats, yet again.  Although it plainly seduced South Carolina wingnut Joe Wilson and goes over big in the tooth-deficient parts of Dixie, it really is too nonsensical and offensive to utter in those precincts where very few homes have license plates and/or appliances in the yard, but utter they do.  You see, righties just glory in the cleansing suffering of others, which they see as richly deserved, and thus rather impolitic and hateful notions such as this must therefore be included, to keep the base both happy and tuned in.  (This strategy is anything but ineffective, by the way.)

In short, the right is currently so bereft of ideas at the moment that they make Arthur Laffer look like John Maynard Keynes; Richard Nixon like Franklin Roosevelt, and what’s rolling out of the Wurlitzer at the moment makes the Barney song sound like Rhapsody in Blue.  Maybe it’s just the bleeding heart liberal in me, but I hope we get health care reform soon, because otherwise a significant number of Americans will die without direly needed brain transplants.

Racism, once coded in terms like “states’ rights” and “inner-city crime,” are now openly turning to attacks on a broadening group of fellow humans, and when they sound too unseemly, reticence is cast aside in favor of calling the swarthy victims “racists.”  You’d think such a silly, insultingly dumb tactic had ever worked, given the strikingly overconfident way it’s been used, and continues to be.

You’d also think, given the thudding and inexorable demographic trends that show that bashing minorities, be they Muslim, Latino, or gay, is tantamount to shouting “Herpes” in a crowded orgy, politically at least, that the Repubs would want to be careful enough to at least phone Frank Luntz for a few synonyms.  Nah.  Too late for that.

Somewhere in the frantic money chase that consumed the Republicans and their supporters for the last decade, everybody got so busy stuffing their pockets that no one gave the vaguest thought to laying the groundwork to sell the same crap again, an omission which would have been even more disastrous had not the Democrats so quickly taken up the fight, with all the campaign contributions that brave stance entailed, and sidestepped any real and needed correction.  Trouble is, the pesky problems persist, and even have the temerity to get worse each day.

For Democrats, who still have a lot of leeway to blame their predecessors, the situation isn’t that bad.  Hiding in the basement for seven years wasn’t exactly impressive, but in this case nothing was better than something.  For Republicans, though, they’re in something of a pickle.  Having made their careers in the glory of lies, lies, and more lies, they’re finding to their considerable chagrin that a lot of people who lost their futures, livelihoods, and cash money kind of think they suck, hence that 20% registration rate.   But rather than look to that other 80%, they’re looking to take that 20 down to fourteen by Sticking To Their Principles.  They know as well as I do that there’s a certain number of Americans who are either so rich, so dumb, or so full of hate that it doesn’t really matter how idiotic, bigoted, or crazy you sound, if you stand for Family Values, God himself cleans up after your parade.  What’s less clear is what, exactly, you plan to do with that little group.  Have potlucks?

On some level, you have to hand it to them.  It is undoubtedly tiresome having to answer questions, produce data, and effect results to prove you’re right, and if a quarter or so of America thinks that that’s just a bunch of commie propaganda anyway, why bother?  There’s still money to be made, even in exile.  Look at Murdoch.  Fox News “soared” in popularity after the 2008 election, but now has every viewer it will ever have, and each night another one hits 85.  We now know the absolute top number of reality-indifferent Americans, and every one of them is watching Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, who have adjusted their “message” accordingly.

We’ve reached a point where unless you’re a cop involved in a domestic dispute in a trailer park, a judge dealing with greedy heirs, or a psychologist dealing with deep sociopathologies, chances are you simply will never meet, much less be forced to listen to, a Republican, unless you’re watching television.

We ought to count our blessings for that, anyway; that’s why Al Gore invented the mute button.