There was this annoyingly triumphant song we used to sing in school about what a keen place Oregon was back in 1915 or so, and even as a kid I thought it was weird.  The chorus ended with, “Forward on and on…  Hail to thee, land of heroes, my O-re-gon.”

Never mind that the lyricist pronounced the final syllable the way clueless New Yorkers do, rhyming with “on,” as though my state were some hostile planet on Star Trek, they also, until recently anyway, missed the point. You see, as a more perceptive ad campaign a dozen or so years ago put it, “things look different here.”  We aren’t into this forward on and on thing.   What Oregon is rightfully famous for is limits.  Limits on suburban sprawl, embodied in our iron-clad Urban Growth Boundary.  Limits on waste, embodied in our first-in-the-nation Bottle Bill.  Heck, until the recent real estate boom, we had a cap on parking spaces downtown, based on the correct assumption that too many parking places turns, well, paradise into a parking lot.

At least since the 1960′s, even our Republicans were considerably to the left of, say, Barack Obama, as fervent advocates of the environment, women’s rights, and what have you.  As Republicans went progressively more down the rabbit hole of righty insanity in recent years, we’ve become one of the bluest of blue states; no Republican has won the governorship since 1984 and we got rid of our last Republican Senator in 2008.  In that race,  bland and moderate-seeming corporatist Gordon Smith was handed his smarmy Mormon ass by liberal hero Jeff Merkley, and it seemed all was right with the world.  For a minute, anyway.

Unfortunately, we have this other  Democratic (!) Senator, Ron Wyden, who yesterday revealed he’s sort of a taller and ganglier, but equally homely Joe Lieberman, at least as Democrats go.  He teamed up with that rising (in the Village, anyway..) star, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to offer a “bipartisan” plan to achieve the Republican’s 40 year old goal: getting rid of Medicare.  His plan, which I don’t need to tell you was hailed as “bold” by the MSM, was so much like Ryan’s utterly toxic concoction from last year that even President Obama fled the room in terror.  That’s bad.  What few other Democrats still worthy of the name there are in the House and Senate were at least as unenthusiastic.  Predictably, Republicans were smugly silent; getting their way by not doing anything is just how they, quite understandably, roll these days.

A lot of Oregonians who remember the old Wyden, before he hopped on the 1% Senatorial gravy train, may have been surprised; he ostentatiously allied himself in his early career with the “Gray Panthers,”  a feisty group of hags and geezers vehemently opposed to anything that would harm seniors.  At the time, I thought it was a wise move, at least politically; in a room full of eighty-somethings, Wyden managed to look both handsome and dynamic, at least comparatively.

Unfortunately, as he’s aged, he has, improbably, gotten a little dynamic,  particularly when it comes to defending our murderous Health Care Industry.   Although no one noticed at the time, he loudly introduced a “compromise” proposal just as Obama was crafting his then-promising Health Care Reform, which coincidentally contained all the unpopular and ineffective BS that turned the eventual bill into a millstone around every Democratic neck, including the President’s.  No doubt fortified by a lot of campaign money that must have resulted, Wyden cleverly decided not to take credit, but rather move on to the next thing, and the dollars that would come from that.

Okay, that’s politics in the new century, but really,  a nominal Democrat teaming up with Ryan?  Even in his home state and among Republicans, Ryan is about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse, and the least lucid teabaggers emphatically want government’s filthy hands off “their” Medicare.  Aside from, say, Citizens United, there’s simply no way to explain such behavior.   But no other explanation is needed, is it?

Wyden needs to have a primary opponent, but fast.  Here in the “land of heroes,” we’ve been willing to vote for him for his personality, not his looks, for way too long.  Now, like in the final scene of “The Picture of Dorian Grey,” they’ve become the same thing, and Oregon Democrats deserve better.  He isn’t up for reelection until 2014, by which time he’ll probably have bought a Florida compound next to Rush Limbaugh’s, but I’ll be waiting.  Forward on and on.

It’s quite dispiriting to write a blog, particularly about things that matter, when the available media is so maniacally obsessed with things that, well, don’t.  So successful have the Republicans been in creating their post-reality “empire” that even those few in the media who know better are constantly reduced to anointing, say, Newt Gingrich, as a potential nominee, that is when they’re not worrying about whether Christmas is in some sort of danger, fretting that the Muppets might be Commies, and allowing that Teddy Roosevelt was maybe a little like Hitler.  Nothing uttered by a Republican, no matter how preposterous, is felt to be undeserving of Equal Time,  whether it’s Gingrich promising to appoint JOHN BOLTON as his Secretary of State, Rick Santorum claiming to know something about sex, or Rick Perry, well, opening his mouth.

I’m getting progressively more annoyed by this dreadful reality each day.  It’s one thing that our media stars are dumb and/or craven enough to sit respectfully nodding at such perfect nonsense passing for political discourse, but it’s quite another to think anyone watching with two brain cells to rub together is playing along.  It’s insulting, frankly, that every day we are forced to listen to the ravings of utter lunatics competing to out-crazy each other, knowing full well that today’s top clown will fall out of the car just as clumsily as yesterday’s, and for the same entirely predictable reasons.  The fact that a substantial portion of Americans have been rendered dumber than posts by decades of increasingly febrile Republican propaganda campaigns does not make their addled beliefs somehow worthy of discussion; the real, more interesting story is how this was allowed to happen, and it’s told each time we open a newspaper or turn on the TV.

It’s a bit different situation for Democrats, though, especially on those rare occasions that they actually act like Democrats.  When the President points out the previously undisputed fact that job growth was worse under the Bush tax rates than under Clinton’s, he gets a sneering “3 Pinnochios” from the WaPoo’s ironically named “fact-checkers,” despite, well, the numbers.   Another ironically named outfit, Politifact, called Democrat’s claims that Paul Ryan’s health plan would end Medicare “the lie of the year,” which in itself seems rather grandiose given the competition, but Ryan’s Plan does end Medicare.  Kind of a big fail if you ask me, unless they intend their name to be ironic.  Maybe they do; kind of like Herman Cain calling himself a “Presidential Candidate.”  Whatever the rubes believe…

Meanwhile, in the increasingly unpleasant Real World, the big money Republicans hardly have anything to be so fraudulently worked up about.  Despite Obama’s recent, substance-free nods to something the credulous call “populism,” there is nothing to be gained, and a lot to be lost, by handing the reins of government over to any of the nincompoops running as Republicans in 2012.  They’re doing a fine job of giving Obama cover to govern to the right of Reagan, and he hasn’t disappointed.  Whereas, the crazy stuff coming out of the Republican Clown Car is so wantonly destructive that it could start to affect the portfolio, even as it’s already direly exacerbated the Servant Problem in Arizona and Alabama.

Republicans have been, it seems, a little too successful in encouraging Americans to believe utter horseshit.  Too successful to realistically mount a Presidential campaign, anyway.   Nonetheless, President Obama’s ironically named Secretary of Health just today defied the FDA and banned girls younger than 17 from getting emergency contraception without a prescription.   With “enemies” like these, the Right has found, to its everlasting delight, it longer needs friends; think of the money they’ll save not bothering to elect one.

Republicans, who unaccountably thought he was super-wonderful the whole time and still do, predictably learned the wrong lesson from the last decade.  In their bubble world, you’re doing something wrong unless large numbers of people despis you, so guys like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio can be forgiven for their absurd overconfidence, and poor Jonah Goldberg can likewise be forgiven for thinking Rep. Paul Ryan is a towering specimen of Presidential timber.  All have employed the lowest of Bush tactics: demonizing (and creating) enemies, flouting due process, shutting down dissent, and lying when the truth would sound better, and all have scored Pyrrhic victories here and there before crashing into a solid wall of public and judicial opposition.  All are, to varying degrees, in deep electoral jeopardy, with upside-down approval ratings and recall elections looming for the worst of them.  None of them will be remotely able to help the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, except perhaps by hiding out in Rush Limbaugh’s guest house for six months.

Now, if you were a normal politician in such a situation, you might attempt a little bit of a public course correction, but these are Republicans, whose contempt for ordinary voters is only matched by their contempt for democracy itself, so they have a better idea: disenfranchising voters.  From Florida to Wisconsin, a passel of  restrictive voter-ID laws, hatched by Koch-funded ALEC, are being rammed through partisan legislatures and fast-tracked to kick in before angry voters can return to the polls.  Nationally, Republicans are blithely dismissing a string of recent special election defeats as a mere failure of “messaging.”  Really.

What they’re saying is that the large number of Americans who rightly despise them shouldn’t be voting at all, and of the rest of them, not a few are too dumb to make up their own minds without being shown Frank Luntz flash cards.  Is it possible that such obnoxious treatment, once haughtily doled out to easy targets like hippies, gays, brown people, and their ilk, is finally going to reach a tipping point when it lands equally on old people, teachers, firemen, bus drivers, nurses, lifeguards, policemen, scientists, and what have you?   The point of offending people for political gain, as practiced by Republicans, is to gain the loyalty of those who don’t like the target group, thus forgoing relatively few votes to gain many more.  Thus, the strategy depends on simple arithmetic….  ah, that’s it.  For Republicans, arithmetic has now gone the way of evolution, climate change, and economics; that is, it’s slipped the surly bonds of reality to ascend, gloriously, into the ether of faith.  Remember Karl Rove’s “math,” which proved beyond a doubt that Republicans would retain the House in 2006?  That’s what’s happening here.

Republicans got so busy subtracting people from their supporters that they forgot about adding them on the other side, and thus are left hoping, once again, that money can buy love, or at least votes.   At the rate they’re going, they might as well open a Tiffany’s account for every American and skip the annoying barrage of corporate-sponsored attack ads.  It might be cheaper, and after all, if it worked for Newt…..

The good part, though, is that as usual, Jim and Mike always accidentally include real information in their zeal to get every word right, and better yet, have to resort to such weak evidence to back up the inanities they’re propounding, that they do achieve a sort of low comedy.  In a breaking news article entitled, “The GOP’s Winning Streak,” we learn from Karl Rove himself, among many others, that the only thing standing in the way of his Permanent Republican Majority is a need for a little “education” targeted at unbelievers.  Remember when Condi Rice wanted to “educate” people about weapons of mass destruction?  Of course you did, because you aren’t Jim and Mike.

A few juicy tidbits:

—Deficits are all the rage on Capitol Hill, and will be until Congress wends its way through the debt limit fight and the next budget. The word “deficit” appeared in 470 documents in the Congressional Record between the beginning of January and the end of March, more than in any session’s opening since 1995, according to a review by POLITICO. And Americans listened: Asked by Gallup to identify the most important problem facing the nation, 13 percent said “federal debt” in March of this year, up from 8 percent a year ago.

Is it me, or is it pretty pathetic to claim that a rise from single to low double digits in the face of a 24/7 media barrage is something to crow about?  Thirteen percent?  Twice that many people, at least, think the moon landing was a fake.  Hint to Jim and Mike….  Don’t confuse us with the facts, as they tend to make the story fall apart.

—The broader budget debate is now fought on the tea party’s terms: It’s not whether to reduce government, it’s by how much. This helps explain why serious centrist commentators and even some liberals PRAISED a $6 trillion budget cut plan proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). Remember how a similar plan was received two years ago?

Yippee!  People have gotten stupider, which must mean more of them are reading Politico.

—Thanks to a pickup of 675 legislative seats in 2010 – many because of these budget principles — the most sweeping work is getting done in states. Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana are now working, real-time labs for discovering how much the party can cut government – without cutting off the support of independents. A GOP senator told us the party studies what happens in these state showdowns to test the limits of what will work here. One early finding: Many think Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) went too far, too fast by gutting union power without first educating the public.

Ya think?  How did these guys get jobs?

“The country knows it’s in serious trouble,” Gingrich said. “You see this with Scott Walker, you see it with John Kasich [in Ohio], you see it with Rick Scott [in Florida], you see it with Chris Christie [in New Jersey], you see it with Mitch Daniels [in Indiana].”

Ah, the most hated politicians in America look popular to Newt Gingrich, and the Bambi-like reporter goes ahead and types.  Better yet, he doesn’t get the unintentional hilarity of this morsel from John Thune, and thus makes his irredeemably boring and hackish little puff piece funny (emphasis mine):

“If you overreach too far, you can get a backlash,” Thune cautioned. “We have to sound reasonable. But the reason the president moved so far is that he has recognized that the government has gotten much, much larger, and that most independents in the country are very uncomfortable with that.”

No follow-up question, natch.  After hearing from Karl Rove about how we can cut “trillions” later, easy, we get more choice blather from Newt Gingrich, and then another word about how people just need the be “educated,” from, improbably, Tim Pawlenty, to wrap the whole thing up with a bow:

Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and 2012 presidential candidate, said by phone from San Jose, Calif., that fiscal arguments have given the party a broader appeal as more people “became aware and educated that it’s not just a matter of political rhetoric – it’s a matter of sixth-grade math.”

No, in sixth grade they explain some of the crucial differences between a Family Budget and the Federal Budget, which is one reason Republicans are so hot on home schooling.  Later, you learn that everything Republicans say is the opposite of the truth.  But not at Politico, despite all evidence.

“We are in for a sustained period of structural reform,” Pawlenty said. “The country is prepared for the change. The public deserves the truth. They can handle the truth. … Given how deep the hole is, I’m not worried about overreach. I think we should try to be as bold and courageous as the American people will tolerate, and we need to lead them there.”

That sounds like rhetoric to me, and of a kind of scary sort…  Reminds me of this:

At the opening of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell describes Scarlett O’Hara thusly: “…she wasn’t beautiful, but everyone thought she was.” Now, before you start thinking I’m going to bring up the battle axe of the borealis, I’m not, because my argument isn’t really about beauty (or lack thereof).  It’s about the deep and abiding character flaws that develop when people are encouraged by those around them to think they have gifts they simply don’t have, and how such delusional self-confidence leads people like Scarlett to repeatedly make drastic and irreversible mistakes which harm others and ultimately, themselves.  The plot is hardly new; would somebody please alert the (liberal) media?

When you look at today’s Republican party, today coincidentally centered in Scarlett’s old Confederacy, they might as well all be wearing hoop skirts at Twelve Oaks, perhaps even showing their bosom before three o’clock, against Mammy’s sage advice.  As such, a sneering, self-entitled jackass saddled with a lifetime of failures big and small like George W. Bush could simply step onto the national stage and magically become a “moderate”  regular guy you could “have a beer with,” but even more implausibly, a man who would never deficit-spend and would also pursue a “humble” foreign policy.  When Condi Rice made the laughable assertion, repeatedly, that “no one could have predicted _______,” you have to admit she had a point, she just defined “no one” a little differently than most of us would, meaning “no one who matters.”  The media fell for it, after all, along with enough credulous Americans, and just went ahead and put an erratic, destructive ne’er-do-well into an office where he could do quite a bit of damage, which of course he did.  By that time, though, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could have seen this coming.

Remember Newt Gingrich, the Historian and Intellectual?  How about Dick Cheney, the Statesman?  Colin Powell, the Incorruptible?  The New Nixon?  So confident that the media is as shallow and dumb as the Tarleton twins, for all of my adult life Republicans have built their success in getting people to believe they’re beautiful, against all evidence, and then screwing them over later, just like Scarlett.  Perhaps because he’s a fellow Georgian, Newt Gingrich even takes her fiddle-dee-dee a step further and marries someone better.  That always shows ‘em.

The competition for the new belle of the ball seems to be heating up of late: there’s the ravishing Scott Walker of Wisconsin (whose Mammy has unfortunately not suggested a hair piece yet… maybe she’s short); the elegant John Kasich of Ohio; the statuesque Paul LePage of Maine; the, well, striking Rick Scott of Florida; and pleasingly plump Chris Christie, who would no doubt benefit from some aggressive corset work.  As you’d expect, the media thinks they’re all so beautiful that it’s really too hard to decide, even as their regretful supporters have seen them once too often in curlers and cold cream to go there, even drunk.

The good news is that now there are a lot more profiteering Rhett Butlers to go around these days, and they have so much money they can afford a whole passel of Scarletts, so few of these worthies expect to be making any dresses out of the drapes anytime soon.  The bad news is that there’s a new Scarlett in town, out to avenge the burning of Atlanta and such, by the name of Paul Ryan, and with his prominent widow’s peak he even, disturbingly, looks the part.

The Kochs and their ilk  have already factored in a few millions lost here and there with their state-based “investments” that won’t pan out; when you’ve got $40 billion, that’s less than the dry cleaning.  The big goal was to grab the federal government, which is, as Willie Sutton put it, “where the money is,” and Paul Ryan and the Republican majority are the getaway vehicle.  Touted endlessly as “courageous” (even among Democrats), Ryan’s latest “plan” is the expected toxic combination of naked reverse Robin Hood horse shit, which is anything but “courageous” in our Foxified political environment.  Remember, the last time a President attempted to do anything but cut taxes was in 1993, and though that produced a surplus and unprecedented economic boom, to the media it was still the grave mistake they called it at the time because it resulted in Clinton losing Congress.

But in a way they may be right.  It is courageous to say, outright, that you plan to do away with Medicare while lowering taxes on wealthy corporations, just as it is equally courageous to say you are also going to do away with collective bargaining, give back direly needed federal transportation dollars, hand fancy jobs to unqualified cronies (and/or their predictably worthless children), rip art off the walls and call justices bitches (to their faces, to boot, not like Barbara Bush), and tell people to “kiss my butt.”   Few Republicans I can think of have ever been quite so courageous, especially with an election coming up, and I’m delighted to think they think it will work out for them.

What they’re saying is, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Even Scarlett got that message….  Will the voters?

CH: Kloppenburg/Prosser results tomorrow….  Keep your fingers crossed.

Paul Ryan, America’s Most Overrated Congressman, naturally stepped into the fray, darkly intoning that Madison was turning into Cairo, which would be kind of stupid, given that that makes Walker into Mubarak and all, but for all Ryan doesn’t know, which is evidently plenty, he knows that scary Mooslim hordes are catnip to his Fox-addled base.  Throw it at the wall and see what sticks….  whitebread cheesehead teachers and students, to the stupid people righties have lovingly cultivated, are just as big of thugs as those dirty habibs, especially if they belong to some union.

Then the Boner dictated the following (undoubtedly from some cocktail lounge full of lobbyist floozies, since it was after noon:)

“Republicans in Congress -– and reform-minded (Reform, in Republicanese, means a return to the robber baron era) GOP governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich and Chris Christie –- are daring to speak the truth about the dire fiscal challenges Americans face at all levels of government, and daring to commit themselves to solutions that will liberate our economy and help put our citizens on a path to prosperity. Maybe it’s the booze, but surely Boehner understands that the “dire fiscal challenges” government faces are due to a combination of Republican looting and the systematic destruction of the middle class while his party has been in ascendance.  To cover for this obvious but inconvenient fact, Boehner goes all Palin, and acts like these showboating little emperors are somehow victims. I’m disappointed that instead of providing similar leadership from the White House, the president has chosen to attack leaders such as Gov. Walker, who are listening to the people and confronting problems that have been neglected for years at the expense of jobs and economic growth. Anyone who isn’t illiterate understands that for the last century or so, Republicans NEVER produce prosperity, and tend to lose jobs even as they enrich the wealthy.  Further, the Chamber of Commerce and Dick Armey, despite their little hoedown last November, are not the people; they’re the opposite.

According to news reports, the White House has even unleashed the Democratic National Committee to spread disinformation and confusion in Wisconsin regarding the governor’s courageous actions. Like all “courageous” Republican actions, this one involves talking tough and siccing the army on your opponents.  Who, exactly, is doing the “unleashing” here? I urge the president to order the DNC to suspend these tactics. This is not the way you begin an ‘adult conversation’ in America about solutions to the fiscal challenges that are destroying jobs in our country. So, just days after Boehner pooh-poohed job losses with a boozy “So be it,” he wakes up and cares about jobs, just not for the wrong people.  And as usual, he blames job losses and deficits caused by his party on somebody else.  Yeah, teachers in Wisconsin cased the meltdown.  And ACORN.  Also.

The following is either so stupid, or so diabolical (I’m guessing the latter), that the lies include “and” and “the.”

Rather than shouting down (Really.  Obama, shouting? )those in office who speak honestly (Walker’s proposal to strip unions of their bargaining power is nothing more than good old Republican union busting, which why it stirred Boehner from his stupor in the first place, and since it’s a manufactured crisis about a manufactured deficit, calling Walker “honest” in this case is about like calling Chris Christie “lanky,” but do go on, Boner.) about the challenges we face, the president and his advisors should lead. Until they do, they are not focusing on jobs, and they are not listening to the American people who put them in power.” Here Boehner gets the high-turnout Obama sweep of 2008 mixed up, conveniently, with the low-turnout post Citizens (!) United election of 2010.  You see, union busters did not put Obama in power, Quite the opposite, but they did elevate the Boner to a position evidently far above his humble abilities, and like so many others who watch too much FOX, Boehner thinks that he and a couple of disastrous accidental Governors are now running things here in America.

So confident is Boehner and his ilk that the Supreme Court has handed them the keys to the kingdom that they’re not even bothering to come up with plausible excuses anymore for their ridiculous and pointlessly confrontational behavior.  Let’s hope the Wisconsin teachers and public servants hand them their asses; the alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

Now, I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but Karl Rove was right and I was wrong. I’m nostalgic for Bush.  Personally.  Compared to the current crop of righties, Bush was a gentleman, statesman, and since the emergence of Palinmania, even a scholar to boot.  Thanks in part to such certifiably cuckoo halfwits as Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, Andrew Breitbart, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Paul Ryan, and on and on grabbing the ball and running with it,  George W. Bush is almost starting to look like some sort of hippie.  Worse, the crazy direction in which he dragged the country with regard to war, civil liberties, and secrecy have now become normalized under the new administration, leaving the Right to sputter that even all that horrendous horseshit amounts to coddling the terrorists.  Gazing through Overton’s window, the view of ol’ W has gotten much more attractive.

It was clear that big changes had to be made in the new century to make the world safe for Republicanism; years of peace and prosperity had rendered Americans way too uppity, even leading some of them to want to save the planet from boiling and worse, stop spending so much on the military.  Losing wars, crippling deficits, and severe austerity programs would be immediately needed to nip those intolerably misguided notions in the bud, but Bush/Cheney were both too smart and too polite to say so, at least in front of the servants.  Conservatism suddenly became “compassionate,” foreign policy would be “humble,” and even in the fact of the 9/11 terror attacks, no genocide and/or internments would ever get on TV.  ”Islam is a religion of peace,” and all that.  Well, in 2010, Republicans have put away Bush’s bong of Peace and in its place grabbed Bill Kristol’s metaphorical (of course)  M-16 of Empire to do a little “spray and pray,” and the results are predictably disturbing.

Covertly, of course, Bush and Rove never really left the “Southern Strategy” behind;  gay became the New Black, and Christian Dominionists, Randians, barely-reformed white supremacists, and charlatans of every stripe were quietly installed wherever they’d fit, but nobody in the Administration was dumb enough to crow about it.  How quaintly demure; call it the Southern Belle Strategy, (eyelashes batting fetchingly), “Whatever do you mean?”  Well, Mammy would be horrified to find what the “young Misses” of the Republican leadership are up to these days; rather than so wisely having a light snack before the barbeque at Twelve Oaks, they’re “eatin lak a feel han an’ gobblin’ lak a hawg.”

It started subtly; the right-wing media that had spent years marveling at the gardenia-like scent of George Bush’s stinkiest dumps fled in droves when The Decider tried to sell some port operations to the murderous and perfidious Habibs.  They went even more nuts when he uttered the blandest statements about immigration reform, and they  wildly applauded his response to Hurricane Katrina, which if nothing else certainly put the Darkies in their place.    Republican operatives have their flaws, but stupidity is not among them; and they saw, after creating so many so many catastrophes without any political consequences, that not being racist enough was about the only way they could lose their Fox-addled base.  After that, they were off to the races.  Gone was Lee Atwater’s admonition that in order to “out-nigger” somebody, you had to at least use a more delicate term.  Karl Rove’s pie-in-the-sky hope to rope in some of the growing Hispanic vote with cynical appeals to Family Values ended up tossed like an expired can of menudo, and anybody to the left of, say, Ari Fleischer on “The Arab Question” was bound to end up in Gitmo with a broomstick up their ass, as far as the Republican “base” was concerned.  Racism was back, and at least in the amnesiac media, better than ever.

Which brings us to today, where we are in the curious position of looking back at “Smoke ‘em Out” Bush, the Worst President in Modern American History, as paragon of decency and restraint compared to the outright fascism and astonishingly naked eliminationism his disastrous reign unleashed amongst his erstwhile followers.  We’re also seeing a lame and hypocritical attempt by Obama and company, who squandered an overwhelming mandate to “refudiate,” and maybe even try to solve, any of the myriad outrages he committed, preferring instead to pursue wonky and nebulous legislative “victories,” none of which have amounted to a hill of beans.

While it may have once been better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt, in the age of Fox News and its relentlessly repeated Obamaphobia, this maxim no longer holds.  The Republicans are now the party of racism, militarism, and elite thievery, and they no longer care who knows it.

Yeah, Karl, I’m nostalgic.

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.

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.