When I look back at the cringe-inducing but disarmingly vague expressions of George Bush, like “armies of compassion,” I have to admit that Chris Matthews, for perhaps the fourth time in his career, might actually be correct about something; a little nostalgia for Bush is probably in order.  After all, the horror of eight years of zero job growth, a ruined economy, two lost but continuing wars, and a soaring deficit “forcing” draconian social spending cuts are a little easier to tolerate when Bush at least had enough respect for the voters’ intelligence not to proudly sell such shockingly undesirable outcomes in advance.   His ideological soulmates still in office, however, see no more need for such gauzy and effeminate euphemisms as they busily deflect blame and promise dreadful consequences for the catastrophe they themselves caused.   They just come right out and say that poor people should be starved so they can’t breed, sick people deserve to die for their dissolute habits and poor planning, so-called “terrorists” should be locked up and tortured if not summarily executed without so much as a trial, and the millions of unemployed should be cut off without a cent so they get off their slovenly asses and fix the Servant Problem.  Unlike the more politely imperious ruling classes of yore, this bunch proudly blurts this stuff out right in front of said servants in a way I find, at least tactically, a bit dumb, and that’s putting it mildly.

Just to make things even more blindingly obvious, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gleefully exulted over the Republican-engineered Citizens United ruling, probably the least popular Supreme Court Decision of my lifetime, as though even the most spelling-challenged teabagger would fall for the idea that corporations ought to be “free” to, well, buy elections.  Illinois Representative Paul Ryan one-upped him, though, when he came out and said that Medicare and Social Security, unfortunately, would have to go, too, because the rich are nervous about their portfolios again.  Once such radical and obnoxious affronts to what remains of our status as a nominal democracy were greeted in the media with nodding approval, why wouldn’t Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning say “tough shit” while singlehandedly dumping millions of the unemployed into destitution?  Don’t like it?  Talk to the finger.  And why wouldn’t multiple right-wingers use the Chilean earthquake to set diligently to work on the murderous CIA-installed right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet’s “legacy project?”  Crazier things have worked before.

As I’ve said before and will again, a grim necessity for which I apologize in advance, the relentlessly uncritical parroting by the media of Republican “ideas” as their proponents continue to spin further into the vortex of their own vanity, greed, and risibly unwarranted delusions of superiority will leave them in an uncomfortable spot come November, unless they go back to lying, and pronto.  You may be able to say what you really think on television, and have everyone on your side of the red light think it’s both wise and prescient (although even George Bush, for all his flaws, was usually smart enough not to do so), but it bodes ill when you forget that there are actually real people watching who have a lot more free time to watch, thanks to your brilliant stewardship of the economy.

My mother had a favorite expression about serial liars, “He’d lie when the truth would sound better,” which was at least a standard to which one could formerly hold Republicans.  Now they’re telling the truth, and it isn’t pretty.

It’s certainly no mystery why the GOP and its fanboys at Fox and elsewhere are always on the attack.  Aside from the fact that only 20% of Americans will still reluctantly admit to being Republicans, the other 80% are always susceptible to inconvenient facts slipping into the conversation, which would clearly make an embarrassing mess of everything if that sort of thing got out of hand.  But denying facts, as Senator (!) John Kyl did recently when he simply said he didn’t believe a Harvard study that found that 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health care, and making shit up, as the Cheney family is fond of doing, sometimes isn’t enough.  As Karen Finley (she of manufactured GOP outrage over her NEA grant back in the day…) once wrote, “When you’re having an argument, and it isn’t going your way, it’s time to bring out the threats.”

The GOP is very good at threats, and even better at carrying them out, not just because they’re assholes, which they are, but because they have to.  The old lawyers’ adage, that when the facts are against you, argue the law, and when the law is against you, argue the facts, has now been adopted by the GOP, with its own special twist.  When both are against you, go after the witness, guns a’ blazing.

I’ve written before about this curious, to the outsider, war on truth-tellers, but in the aftermath of the Obama/Fox News flap, which to my considerable delight shows no sign of abating, this bizarre tactic has gone into overdrive; every clown to emerge from the GOP Volkswagen has a big mallet in its hand, hell bent on pummeling the hated seltzer-sprayer du jour.  Glenn Beck was perhaps the most deliciously typical of the bunch; he went after Anita Dunn using deceptively edited video to “prove” not that what she said was false, since it wasn’t, but that she was a dirty Mao-worshipping commie trying to “control” the media.  Though patently ridiculous, for certain people, conveniently including all of his audience, annoying truths can be swatted away by saying that the person who had the temerity to utter them is a poopyhead.  So there.  Cut to commercial.  (If there still are any, that is…)

To the reality-based community, this seems kind of silly, but it’s been surprisingly effective in the past, so why not?  After all, when Scott Ritter said that Saddam Hussein had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD, he was pronounced a child molester, and when Joe Wilson said the same thing, he was declared to be a disgruntled lightweight on a junket his wife cooked up.  Oh, yeah, and she’s a CIA agent, too.  Bill Maher, Ashleigh Banfield, and Phil Donahue were all summarily fired and roundly shut down for their unseemly brushes with the truth, too.  And there you have it: multiple lives ruined, but at least that pesky truth didn’t get out, or at least gain currency, until it was safely too late.  Mission Accomplished.  Michael Moore can make movies that clearly show the corruption of the Bush Administration, the death-dealing venality of the health insurance industry, and the wanton theft inherent in Wall Street, and, well, he’s rich, and also fat, so who’s going to believe him?  The Dixie Chicks could say, on stage, that they were embarrassed by George Bush, just like most Americans, and not only are they denounced as the usual Hollywood lightweights, but traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy on foreign soil.  Shut up and sing, indeed.

This would all be funny if it weren’t so damaging;  first, it serves to silence voices with critically important things to say that Americans need to know, second, it discourages others from speaking out, and last, the media falls for it, hook, line and sinker, every time.  Glaciers melt while everyone talks about Al Gore’s house and travel, innocents are slaughtered while pundits dwell on Janeane Garofalo’s career being on the  skids, and the country goes bankrupt while  the media dismisses Ron Paul as a crackpot.

Telling lies, in the curious media landscape of 21st century America, has become a canny career move.  You could end up with a NYT column (Bill Kristol, David Brooks), head of the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz), or with a plum spot on Fox (Karl Rove).  Tell the truth, though, and all hell breaks loose, and you’d better hope your affairs are in order (Paul O’Neill).  Like just about everything else these days, telling the truth, especially in public, is a luxury few of us can afford.

UPDATE: Fox just had a neat little segment where their fair n’ balanced panel all agreed, well 4-1, that the secret to ending unemployment was, surprise, eliminating the minimum wage.  To what?   A dollar a day like the Malaysians?  Once again, Fox stands up for the little guy against the elites.  Not.