“Why would you normalize trade with a country that sponsors terror?” the candidate asked a crowd of supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “There is (sic) reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you are 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. ”

Really? Hezbollah, a ragtag band of lightly armed Habibs scattered across a few faraway repressive countries, is going to team up with Iran and and go all Kruschev on us, putting MISSILE SITES from the nukes Iran may or may not ever have a mere ninety miles away.  Not to offend Sarah Palin or anything, but the very idea is, well, retarded.  Close to the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard; is there no bottom limit to the utter implausibility of things Republicans say?  I watched the clip of her entire demented and excruciating ten-minute speech, and I have mercifully decided not to post it, but more on that later.

You see, to people on the over-the-cliff right like Bachmann, Cuba is the sponsor of terrorism, despite the fact that we harbored for many years the actual Cuban terrorist, CIA flunkie Orlando Bosch, who killed 73 people on a Cuban airliner, just to show that nasty Fidel a thing or two.  (President GHW Bush even pardoned the poor thing in 1990 for his 1976 bombing).  But to Bachmann and her rapt audience, terrorism has a color, a mixture of red and brown, and the only answer is to continually kick it to the curb, no matter how ridiculous the persecution fantasies you have to indulge to get there.  In her world, Islamofascists can turn overnight into Islamocommies, and it’s just tomato, tomahto.  They’re bad, alright?

As is so often with Bachmann, she is just spouting the latest loony thing she heard from the craziest righties in America who flock to her appearances; she bragged about how she just spent time with the (increasingly nursing home-bound) anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, who will continue to party like it’s 1959 until they go to their graves, and thought they must be onto something as they gummed their jello.  In the real world, of course, most Cuban Americans would favor reduced travel and trade restrictions, and at any rate Fidel will soon tip over, but though it is unlikely that Havana will turn into Houston overnight, is this something the right still needs to wax apocalyptic over?

Of course it is.  At this point, the political and economic orthodoxies of the Republican Right are so toxic, destructive, and demonstrably calamitous, that the only way to continue to sell them is to blame their inevitable results some hated brown people or other, and then go after said other with guns (literally, often) a’blazing.  Everything, and I mean everything, is a racially-tinged apocalypse these days, with the glaring exception of the real apocalypses unfolding before our eyes, like the global looting of public treasuries by an unaccountable elite, the systematic destruction of the environment by that same elite, and corrupt governments throughout the “free” world regularly turning to police state tactics against their suffering citizens.

But Michele Bachmann thinks we ought to worry about the Second Coming of the Cuban Missile Crisis, instead.  Worse, her supporters have an entirely different Second Coming in mind, and they’re clearly dumb enough to believe in both.  To illustrate, she points out, accurately, that before Ronald Reagan was President, we were a creditor nation, but yet now we’re a debtor nation because Obama is President, confident that her audience has no clue what happened in the intervening years to change that, since they’ve been so fully narcotized by FOX, Limbaugh et al, that they just nod approvingly.

If you have the stomach, watch:  The video is up at Raw Story. (She looks disturbingly attractive and may even have false eyelashes on; she means business….)  Would she be the running mate for Romney that could pull in the stupid vote?  I fear the answer might be yes.  She’s dumb enough, she’s crazy enough, and dammit, people like her.

First, we have Sarah Palin’s novel notion that Paul Revere rode around Massachusetts sporting an NRA bumper sticker on his horse, ringin’ bells and raisin’ hell to “warn the British” about something or other, a delusion so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that even Fox News’ Chris Wallace could barely stifle a chuckle over it.  Surreally, this got Michele Bachmann’s well-teased dander up, leading her minions to solemnly proclaim that Caribou Barbie was insufficiently “serious.”  Before Allen Funt could pop out of the bushes, along came Tim Pawlenty with a “plan” that makes George Bush look like a hippie, and not incidentally would increase the deficit by several trillion.

Not to be outdone, Herman Cain then became the first Republican to propose stimulative infrastructure spending of suitably millennial  proportions; our own Chinese wall to keep out the Mexicans, complete with an alligator-infested moat, to predictable cheers from his addlepated supporters.  In case this idea sounded like too, well, constructive, he hastened to add that no Mooslims would serve in his cabinet, but he might hire a gay or two because they would potentially be a fashionably dressed bulwark against creeping Sharia.  Later, after that, he backtracked a bit…  Mooslims could serve, if they took a loyalty oath over a pizza that resembled the Blessed Virgin.

Meanwhile, Democrats again demonstrated their lameness and political ineptitude by calling loudly for the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner, politely ignoring the whoremongers (and just plain whores) on the other side of the aisle.  The Republican leadership has its flaws, but stupidity is not among them, so they largely (and wisely) stayed mum, perhaps partly out of envy.

Then, along came the Frothy Mixture, and I was finally moved to type.  For sheer loathsomeness and anti-electability, no one beats the repulsive and crazy Rick Santorum:  Palin minus the brains, Newt minus the popularity, Pawlenty minus the sex appeal, and Mitt Romney minus the principles.

Behold today’s brief exchange after a “discussion” about climate change, which he naturally considers a liberal plot, with, naturally enough, Rush Limbaugh (h/t Mother Jones…):

Limbaugh: I have a minute and a half. You ever ask yourself where the American people are politically? Do you ever fear the American people just maybe want a European socialist country, that they’d rather be dependent on government? Does that worry you?

Santorum: Does it worry me? Well, you know, Rush, ’cause you combat it every day with the popular culture and the media and academic institutions, that gets pounded away every day into the minds of our young people, and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened on your show where people said, “You know, you opened, the scales fell from my eyes. It’s finally making sense to me. I understand all of these lies I’ve been told.” You tell people lies enough and you indoctrinate them enough, of course I’ve got grave concerns and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this is because I think we need — look, the person who’s been able to win the presidency since the age of television has had one thing in common. They’ve been the best communicator in the race. We need someone like a Rush Limbaugh who can communicate and can touch the soul of Americans and can reach out across the radio and television and paint a vision that helps drop those scales, that can remind people what a great country we are and that it’s a great country because we believe in free people and the ability of free people to provide for themselves, their family, their community, and the God they love. That’s what America is about, and we can with get back to that. We need to begin to believe in ourselves instead of the having someone tell us that they need to believe in him, the anointed one to provide for them.

Limbaugh: Rick, thanks for your time. Your passion is infectious. It really is.

And there you have it.  Santorum went on Limbaugh’s show to promote…  Limbaugh.  Even he is too embarrassed to endorse himself, and for good reason.  Not for nothing did Pennsylvania voters turn his useless, cuckoo corpus out of the Senate, along with his stillborn fetus in a jar that he carried around in his minivan, and not for nothing did he get his richly earned Google Problem.  The guy is stupid and crazy enough, but Republicans hate him anyway.  Go figure.

I guess Obama can be as lame, ineffective, and as big of a sellout as he wants, and get away with it.  Kind of like being, as Jon Stewart put it, the thinnest kid at fat camp.

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.

The worthies, using the term loosely, are:

1) Mitt Romney 35.14% Really.  He does look presidential and all, but do you think that all the Bain Capital layoffs, his own “Obamacare,” the Mormonism, and worst of all, the dog on the roof rack incident are going to play well with the teabaggers, let alone normal people?  The Village may swoon, but that’s about it.

2) Ron Paul 10.51% Legalizing drugs and closing military bases?  Enough said.

3) Tim Pawlenty 7.61% Even this low showing isn’t low enough for this (male) Minnesota nitwit, who has accomplished approximately nothing, but will probably still be considered too liberal because he occasionally speaks in complete sentences and isn’t eligible to join AARP yet.

4) Sarah Palin 6.88% Submitted without comment.

5) Michele Bachmann 5.07% Recently Politifact awarded this cuckoo person the dubious honor of being America’s Lyingest Politician, which is indeed saying something.  Of the 13 times they checked her, her highest score, achieved six times, was “False.”  The seven others rated “Pants on Fire,” complete with a neat moving flame logo.  In response to this mild pillorying, Bachmann told her 14th lie.  And she’s crazy, too.  Also.

6) Jim DeMint 5.07% Like Romney, he looks the part, and has that soothing Confederate accent that soothes the party faithful.  Still, he got beaten by not one, but two girls, which can’t possibly go over well in coon-huntin’ country.

7) Herman Cain 3.99% Forgive me for not having heard of this great American, but it’s worth pointing out that he beat …..

Chris Christie 3.26% As America’s Most Unpleasant Fat Person, Christie has stepped into a big pair of shoes (and even bigger pants), and despite Chris Wallace’s schoolgirl crush on him, I don’t expect America to follow.  We like our fat people to be jolly.

9) Rick Santorum 3.26% Thank heaven that Dan Savage put that one to rest.  When will someone tell him?

10) Mitch Daniels 2.90% This genius was George W. Bush’s Budget Director, and we all saw how that turned out.  He’s also a Hoosier.

Sigh.  It would be nice, actually, if any one of these charlatans and/or cretins were capable of presenting an honest conservative argument in this upcoming battle, but they can’t….  Obama is actually quite conservative, and they are saddled with a base that thinks he’s a Kenyan Castro.  Watching the smarmy and despicable Eric Cantor dance around admitting birthers were crazy before that bulldog David Gregory this morning was actually painful; Republicans are stuck between a crazy rock and a corporate hard place, and they respond with a clown car like this.

If Obama is reelected in 2012, it won’t be his own doing.

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.

Last night Cocktailhag-American Jan Brewer, governor (!) of Arizona, was faced with what turned out to be, for her, an insurmountable task: giving  one-minute opening statement in the debate between her and her Democratic opponent for election to the post she gained only through the Obama administration’s stupidity and tone-deafness, and in it she actually managed to make Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes Scholar.  It was stupefying, really.  She had a a few bland, content-free platitudes prepared and a little anti-Obama red meat, but she clearly had no idea what they might be, even as someone must have been applying her pancake.  Remember, Palin didn’t launch, jaw-droppingly, into moose-peranto until she was foiled by “gotcha” questions from that bulldog Katie Couric; Brewer was unable to read on television, without making a dunderheaded ass of herself, a PREPARED ONE-MINUTE STATEMENT.  On a Fox affiliate, to boot.

Is there any sort of floor, at long last, for Republican stupidity?  The whole point of the exercise is to make bad ideas look good on TV, and even in that pathetically modest endeavor, Brewer just scored a big, fat, fail, which is obviously destined to become a youtube blockbuster.  (The video is inescapable on the internet…  go to digby, tbogg, salon, tpm, or pretty much anywhere to watch it;  just pee first and set down all beverages before clicking play…)  Sure, Palin’s stupidity has been parleyed  into her well-crafted victimhood schtick, and stupid people everywhere are gaga over her for reasons they are unable to articulate, but nonetheless firmly hold; an undoubtedly boffo combination that has won many Republican victories in the recent past, but honestly…  Lengthy seconds of giggly silence, as the huge false eyelashes are cast down at something on her desk (what?  My Pet Goat?  Atlas Shrugged?) doesn’t seem like the sort of performance that is going to win over thinking Arizonans, in the unlikely event that there remains such a thing.

Clearly, Brewer has decided, along with most other far right Republicans running this season, that all media, except Fox and hate radio, is the enemy, and see no reason to engage with it at all.  But since they do have to sometimes appear in public before they are elected and can get on with the looting (in Brewer’s case it’s private prisons, who are eagerly making room for all the SB 1070 arrests already…), impertinent backtalk from the Fourth Estate can’t entirely be avoided, so would you people please, for the love of God, at least practice your vapid talking points?  The answer is obviously no.

Here in Oregon we have the male equivalent of a PalinBrewer ConservaBarbie running for governor, whose total qualifications for office consist of being 7 feet tall, a former Trailblazer, and the worst free-thrower in the NBA.  His name is Chris Dudley, and guess what?  No debates, and no appearances except with right-leaning media, and he has so much money, he just might beat former governor John Kitzhaber that way, with content-free attack ads.  Ah, democracy in the Citizens (!) United  era.  Let the dumbest candidate win.

(h/t Raw Story)

Republicans are going to be embarrassed at the way they’ve opposed a mosque — known as Cordoba House or Park51 — that’s planned near Ground Zero, according to one conservative host.

That would be the rational assumption, of course, but the very idea that after all this time, Joe “shut up about that dead girl” Scarborough would still believe that Republicans are even capable of embarrassment, shows that the poor guy is as dumb as he looks.  Has he never heard of David Vitter?  John Boehner?  Dick Cheney?  Tom DeLay?  Michele Bachmann?  Surely he’s at least heard of Sarah Palin.  The main thing all righties have in common, which Scarborough ostensibly fails to see, is that they are never, ever wrong when looking in the mirror, an endeavor to which they clearly devote considerable time, despite their jaw-dropping and well-documented lies, corruption, tawdriness, and/or flat-out stupidity.  To them, and hopefully their Fox-addled followers, they’re still the fairest of them all, and (Lina Lamont voice) “don’t anybody forget it.”  Despite this glaring oversight, you’ve still got to give Morning Joe a little credit:

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough told Republicans Monday that they should “speak out against Newt Gingrich and the voices of hate.” While he was at it, Scarborough threatened to leave the GOP for a party “that actually believes in small government.”

Well, Joe never got his Husky Boy briefs in a twist when Bush expanded, drastically, the size and reach of Big Brother Government when it might have mattered, but you have to give him, say,  a free Supersize upgrade for finally waking up after sleeping through the more than usually drunken Republican frat party of 2001-2009, in which Republicans blew up the deficit and destroyed America’s reputation fighting two losing wars against miscellaneous and shifting groups of amorphous ragheads who, we were told relentlessly, “wanted to kill us.”

Last week, Gingrich compared supporters of the mosque to Nazis. Appearing on Fox & Friends, Gingrich said, “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.”

Doesn’t this quote kinda disprove Scarborough’s theory that Republicans would be worried about being embarrassed, sometime in the supposedly reality-based future?  You’d think.  But it gets worse.

Prior to that, Gingrich argued that the mosque shouldn’t be built near Ground Zero until churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia.

Great minds evidently all think alike; approximately two dozen prominent Republicans, including our very own Nailheadtom, have all proudly babbled essentially the same thing, despite the fact that such idiotic blather has no bearing whatsoever on any of the issues involved.

“This is demagoguery of the first order,” Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said Monday. “And people in the Republican Party need to separate themselves from these voices.”

Apparently one of Scarborough’s many flunkies just looked up “demagoguery” and explained the term to him.

“And I talk to you, my Republican brethren,” he said into the camera. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll be my brethren. I’ll be honest. I’m looking for a conservative party that actually believes in small government and not engaging in Wilsonian wars but that’s another discussion.”

This is probably the one moment here of actual courage.  Scarborough’s been around long enough to learn that you can bash liberals all day long, no matter how scurrilously or falsely and keep your MSM sinecure forever, but just once tell the smallest truth about a righty, or worse, all of them, and you’d better be updating your resume.  You can tell he’s as nervous as a whore in church as he continues:

“I’m just talking, you know, as a friend,” Scarborough continued. “I promise you this. You’re going to be embarrassed. You’re going to look back two, three, four years from now and this is going to be dark blot on your record if you don’t speak out against New Gingrich and the voices of hate.”

Too bad he’s talking to the Mean Girls, who you can bet are already texting like mad.  In four years, they’ll all have their MRS’s, whether to Cato, Heritage, Koch, or what have you, and will be too busy shopping to think about the Bad Old Days.

“This is an embarrassment and you need to speak out against it,” he said.

…As the pigs flew past 30Rock.

Opponents of the mosque protested in lower Manhattan Sunday. Daisy Khan, the wife of the controversial imam backing the Islamic center, said Sunday that opposition was “like a metastasized anti-Semitism.”

MSNBC’s Willie Geist told Scarborough that the opposition is proof that anti-Muslim sentiment is worse now than after Sept. 11, 2001.

“It shows us that we are probably farther backward that we were maybe even nine years ago in our interfaith relations,” said Geist.

Ya think?  As Glenn Greenwald pointed out today, the “Islamophobia” that Ron Paul also decried is the direct product of cynical, race-baiting post-9/11 Republican politics, and it got them two wars, two elections, and worked their base into a paranoid but electorally advantageous bloodlust ever since.  What, exactly, are the chances that such a thoroughly discredited political movement is going to drop a thing like that?  (circles of thumb and forefinger around each eye…)

Scarborough has evidently missed a great deal of what is happening in America since he went on TV, not unlike almost all of his colleagues.  Who in the media, Joe, these utopian few years away, would ever deign to call any Republican out for their past failures, given that no one ever does, despite the fact that there are kind of a lot of them?

Embarrassment is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and if you watch Morning Joe on a regular basis, you’ll see that for Republicans, it’s no longer operative.  Someone send Joe the memo.

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.

Bachmann thoroughly rejected the idea of a social guarantee of health care, saying that the rights guaranteed in America’s founding ideals affirm “your right to own property, not necessarily the right or a guarantee to a specific item, to a specific service, like health care, or a to a specific piece of land. Rather, the underlying principle and the ideal is that if we choose, when we choose, we can choose to strive for as little or as much as we want, and once we acquire that property, nobody can take it away from us. That’s a radical idea, that what I provide belongs to me, not to the king, but it belongs to me. “

Ah, leave it to crazy Michele to even drop the 2nd amendment from the Bill of Rights; it seems to her that all the Founders cared about was property; evidently “e pluribus unum” was a typo for the real national motto, “I got mine.”

Bachmann also attacked the Obama administration’s latest budget and it’s trillion-plus deficit: “Our government is intentionally choosing failure, they’re choosing failure and they’re handing you the budget. How do you like them apples, and how are you going to pay for it? You have to give up up more of your private property, your pursuit of happiness, to pay for their failure. That’s what they’re doing to us.”

Never let the facts spoil a good teabagging.  Despite the fact that only 2% or so of Americans have seen their taxes go up, and ignoring the structural deficit created by the Bush tax cuts, Bachmann conjures up for her credulous followers an alternative universe where Obama’s (imaginary) tax increases threaten our future and the Feds are coming to take away the RV parking next to your trailer.

An overriding theme was that the Obama administration is taking away the freedom of the American people, and reducing them to a subject population. “And the president also wants to raise your taxes to about 40 percent this year. When your taxes are raised to 40 percent, that means government is laying claim to owning 40 percent of you, of what you earn,” said Bachmann. “Think of it that way, because that isn’t just it, the federal income tax, you need to add to that Social Security tax, Medicare tax, state tax, county tax, city tax, township tax, school tax, metro authority tax, sales tax, gas tax. Pretty soon Uncle Sam owns more of you than you do. Is that America? And that’s government depriving you of your God-given right to the pursuit of happiness. That’s not what the Founders thought, they thought that should you should work for you, and you should work for your family, they weren’t about to condemn you to a life of indentured servitude. That’s not the great hope that they had for you, because they thought you were free. They respect you, they saw you as free people. And they knew that you could figure out your own future, you didn’t need to have them for that.”

This last part is the kookiest of all; as usual it invokes the dead, who seldom beg to differ, to support a tirade of Beckian nonsense that, in the end, is little more than a call to survivalist anarchy.  On Planet Bachmann, the metro authority is in cahoots with the school board and state government to pick the patriotic pockets of the average teabagger, all directed by that sinister ringleader, President Obama.  Boy does that guy get around.  Best of all, she defines “America” as some sort of place where we ought to lay our own roads to get to work, home-school our children, burn our own garbage, dig our own wells, and practice frontier justice in the absence of courts and law enforcement.  If this is the platform that is going to catapult her nutty party to the full-spectrum dominance they demand, well, good luck.

Like most Republicans, Bachmann needs to turn off FOX and get out more;  Glenn Beck and the gang may have developed a Unified Theory of The World that has captured the addled brains of the 30 percenters, but selling such a crazy and unrealistic “program” so dishonestly, since all it means is handing over still more power to those who already control the lion’s share of the “property” already, seems unlikely to have broad appeal.

Of course, Bachmann may or may not actually believe her own propaganda, but the idea that Americans are going to rally for the continued upward transfer of wealth and power in the name of “freedom” and “property” seems like something of a non-starter to me.  But no doubt worth a try, in the climate of mass ignorance and alternate reality the right has so systematically crafted in this winter of their discontent, a magical place where the only thing wrong with George Bush was that he was too liberal.  As Bush once said, “…you can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones we’re focusing on.”  Bachmann maybe took that message a little too much to heart.

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.