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

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

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

More scarily, right here in the Northwest we may elect Chris Dudley, who has received NO major newspaper endorsements, and despite being 6’11,” couldn’t make a free throw in his salad days as a Trailblazer, as our next Governor.  Dudley ran his entire campaign according to the Sarah Palin doctrine: avoid the media and never say anything specific about anything.  Add money and stir.  And he’s currently neck and neck with two-term former Governor John Kitzhaber, in deep blue Oregon.  I’m cautiously optimistic, but it’s still possible that we will have a Bushian closet-teabagger leading our state in January.  (Official CHNN prediction: Kitzhaber by a hair…)  Up north, perrenial sore loser Senate/Governor candidate Dino Rossi, perhaps because Washingtonians like the Flintstones, might defeat two-term Democratic incumbent Patty Murray in a contest that seems too close to call, and could be the race that either deprives or awards the Republicans with Senate control.  (CHNN prediction: race not decided on election night because of slow count, but Rossi will lose again, and throw another tantrum about it, like he did last time….)

Now that I’m on a roll (and my second cocktail), why not throw caution to the wind?  Kirk will beat Giannoulias in Illinois; Toomey will beat Sestak in a squeaker in Pennsylvania, and Angle will narrowly best the pathetic Harry Reid in Nevada.  All but Kirk will prove to be horrible embarrassments to their states and not be reelected, damaging Republicans as they storm Washington, babbling incoherently.  In Alaska, the vagaries of her write-in candidacy will leave Lisa Murkowski battered, but perhaps victorious against Democrat Scott McAdams and demonstrably cuckoo person Joe Miller.  Either way, Sarah Palin loses, which gladdens my heart, but I want McAdams to win so badly (I have supported his campaign, natch…) that I won’t jinx him by giving him CHNN’s nod prematurely.

Dishearteningly, the law and order brigades of the prison-industrial complex may yet defeat Proposition 19 in California, which would finally legalize marijuana, thanks in part to the lameness and cowardice of the Obama Administration and Democrats in as a group.  (Indeed, every progressive defeat can pretty much be seen in that dispiriting, if unsurprising, context now…)  In California, Boxer will soundly defeat Fiorina, and Jerry Brown will easily defeat Meg Whitman, and though I’m in favor of more cocktailhags in government generally, I won’t be crying in my gin for those two spoiled, undeserving harridans.  They’ll have to shop sales now, having blown their riches making Californians despise them.  I like that.

Overall, I think Democrats will retain the Senate, but only by one or two seats, and lose the House by a similar margin; like Retzilian, I simply cannot believe that voters are so stupid as to deliver the kind of sweeping victory Republicans have been crowing about for at least a year.  Unlike the media, I take into account the accuracy of all their other predictions over the past decade.

If I’ve left out a seat anybody considers important (and there are many…), it’s only because my crystal ball is just too foggy at the moment.  I dream of 1998, when despite months of unanimous media babbling to the contrary, Republicans got their rather substantial asses handed to them; but I fear 1994, when Republicans launched a similar temper tantrum, and it worked for them (at least until 1996).  Either way, I’ll be drinking early.  I welcome any prognostications y’all might have in comments, and invite you too look back at Retzilian’s from two posts ago, which are considerably more daring (and less gloomy) than mine.

There will be a prize for the most accurate soothsayer, and to placate Steven Rockford, it will be a fur or jewel, just not very fancy ones…..  Voting will remain open until 5:00 pm Pacific time, when I’ll still be sober enough to do math.  Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and just make a guess.

I’m sure that once Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes see this video, they’re both going to have stool in their blood.  You see, right-wing automatons like this numbskull from Alaska only go on Fox to be worshipped, never questioned, and when a normally housebroken Republican poodle like Chris Wallace accidentally commits a wee bit of journalism, going so far as to point out that Miller “didn’t answer my question,” well, I expect that ol’ dog to be dropped off at a Korean restaurant sooner rather than later.  Bad poodle.

Of course, this is Fox, so the other bonkers idea Miller advances, that Alaska, the freeloadingest state in the Union, which hands out checks instead of tax bills to its “citizens,” is some sort of paragon of Randian producerism is allowed to be uttered by this vacant corporate toady without comment means that Wallace might be let off with a mere rolled-up newspaper, this time. (Not the Wall Street Journal, which is so thin these days it wouldn’t scare a chihuahua…) But clearly, even at News Corp, this sort of thing could get out of hand, so I doubt it will continue.  Maybe Wallace was still peeved that Sarah Palin’s other darling, Christine (salt peter) O’Donnell, blew off his show at the last moment, or maybe he is a bit ashamed at his previous work, but nonetheless he tosses a bit of a monkey wrench into Fox’s plans for 2010, which is to get as many crazies into congress as humanly possible by offering them unfiltered access to the dumbest people in America.  The poorly spelled, all-caps hate mail must be just pouring in after this little segment.

Alas, Wallace’s weak but still surprising attempt to point out that a country with record poverty and unemployment has some obligation not to let 50 million people starve is not the sort of thing that will go over big with Fox’s comfortably retired audience, but it still highlights a bit of a quandary for right-wing journalists, even amongst avowed shills like Wallace.  (Revealingly, in another Sunday interview with Karl Rove, Wallace doesn’t blink when Rove says, “We all want a Republican congress, and then lamely corrects himself, changing “we” to “I” and convincing no one…  Maybe that embarrassing honesty set Chris off.)  Perhaps somewhere lurking within the black heart of Rove and the sold soul of Wallace, there is a certain realization that going too far to the right might make America an uncomfortable place, even for the undeserving rich like themselves;  you know what a good security detail costs these days?  50 million desperate poor people could get uppity, and all, especially when your lifelong goal is to get the tax man off your back and onto theirs, but quietly.

In the end, as others have pointed out, the problem with the tea party isn’t their goals, which are widely shared by the media elite, but their lack of subterfuge in declaring them.  It’s okay to publicly deride the long term unemployed, who outnumber available jobs by at least five times, as lazy and insufficiently humble to accept slave wages in the discount retail industry, but it’s quite another to dismiss the very existence of unemployment insurance as something our powdered-wig Founders never envisioned at a time when our whole GDP was not enough to, say, buy a Senate seat in California.  2010 is not 1795, nor even 1900.  The 20th century did happen, no matter how dejected poor little rich Glenn Beck is about it.

On some level, I suspect that what Wallace was trying to delicately convey to Miller was the usual message, that some things mustn’t be said in front of the servants, a rule on which the very existence of the American Right depends.  Their hero, the doddering Ronald Reagan, only called unemployment insurance “prepaid vacation for freeloaders” well before he entered national politics; someone must have later patiently explained to him that it was the freeloaders themselves who prepaid it, and anyway it usually stopped the Real People, that is the rich, from losing too much money in the inevitable crashes they’re always causing.

I expect that the result of this interview will be that Miller will join Palin, O’Donnell, Angle, Paul, and on and on in petulantly refusing to grant any interviews whatsoever, and try to run their campaigns entirely through Facebook and the Koch brothers, bypassing even Fox, especially when it gets all tough on Sundays, and that would be a shame….  For a second there, we got some “real journalism” out of Fox News, and that’s saying something.

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.

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.

Outside the theatre, though, I can’t think of any place where the ability to pull up one’s socks without bending over has much advantage, unless perhaps you want to join the Republican Party.  Of course, their P.A.F. is, unfortunately, metaphorical, and they would no more use their Darwinian backwardness for any good use than they would use it to reach into their pockets.  These knuckle-draggers wear Playtex Living Gloves when they pretend to swing from the trees, and are thus opposed to a lot of crazy backtalk about evolution; it only points up their innate inferiority to their hairier forebears.  (No pun intended, natch…)

But honestly, I’d like to string a tape measure to that Rand Paul, he of the dismissively Darwinian “accidents happen,” who seems to exhibit less empathy toward his fellow primates than a rogue member of a chimp colony…  is he a product of Intelligent Design, or is he the Missing Link?  Inquiring minds want to know.  The two lil’ ol’ “accidents” to which he referred killed 40 human beings, and one is on its way to devastating a substantial portion of the biosphere, perhaps permanently.  Clearly, the guy leapt off the Darwin train about the time opposable thumbs came along, and never looked back.  He could have a P.A.F. of 10, and it wouldn’t be a valid excuse for this sort of behavior, which proved so detrimental to the Neanderthals that they went extinct.

One thing we higher apes know that Republicans refuse to accept is that from the time we came down from the trees, what made humans so (often confoundedly) successful was the cooperative action they undertook that came from being social animals who recognized collective needs and met them.  Hunting/Gathering is great, but when you get home, you’d like a little order, and stepping over the bodies of your clan doesn’t really advance this rather modest goal, nor does warring on the colony next door.

It seems like each day we hear, approvingly, about such pre-civilization travails as bartering with livestock, ritual and excessive child-bearing, and the unfortunate but necessary culling of the herd through privation, as though these concepts were, if not new, smart.  But if indeed we are returning to the law of the jungle, the proponents of this move clearly plan to just watch the spectacle on “Wild Kingdom.”

For example:  Rand Paul

Now lil’ Rand is considerably more attractive than his Papa, which couldn’t hurt (except for that unfortunate white-fro on the top of his head, which appears to be some sort of comb-over alternative…), but Junior clearly didn’t get the Republican memo about Not Telling the Truth Until After the Election.  It’s ok to embrace racists, plutocrats, and scofflaw corporations, but public displays of your ardor are to be strictly avoided until after your swearing-in.  It’s unseemly, especially in front of the servants.  Reagan promised that tax cuts and a military buildup would create prosperity for all, Bush waxed “compassionate,” and whatnot not because they were closet liberals, but because they knew that their real views would go over like a fart in church.  Please, Dr. (!) Paul, make a note of it.  Or not, which I of course prefer.

The LA Times:

I’ve been a tad disconsolate that my old boyfriend, Ricky Serrano, has all but vanished from Los Tiempos; were his intemperate and unprofessional emails to me merely the nose-thumbing of yet another LAT short-timer?  It would explain a lot.  Fortunately, the Times has a new but decidedly not improved Ricky, in this case Ricky Simon, who is doing pretty good job of Keeping Ricky 1′s chair warm, as evidenced by his pathetically stupid article about Barbara Boxer today.  She’s partisan, you know.  The examples he was able to cull from an 18-year Senate career are so thin that if they were a person they would only need one earring, as well.  (Insert Valley Girl voice here) “Well, there was that time when she, like totally dissed James Inhofe.”  The time to which Simon refers is when, after their (first) richly deserved defeat in 2006, Inhofe filibustered a climate change hearing with his delusional claptrap and she had to explain that his bonkers party no longer controlled anything but Fox News, which Republicans naturally took pretty hard.  The other time she purportedly stepped over some partisan line (again, this is in 18 years) was when she corrected a lying and stupid general for repeatedly calling her “Ma’am,” which my own mother always told me all women under 80 hate, preferring, “Senator.”  Wow, that gal is uppity, or so Ricky thinks.  Sheesh.  Naturally, this leads the story to conclude that either serial failure Carly Fiorina or fruitcake diva Meg Whitman, neither of whom have a lick of political experience or brains, to be formidable challengers to Boxer.  Good luck with that LAT.  Can’t wait to see  updates after November.

The Oil Spill:

The whole redneck Riviera has suddenly turned hippie on me, and I love it.  Bobby (Brady) Jindal sounds like Al Gore’s adenoidal sidekick, and when the slick hits Alabama and Mississippi, you won’t be able to smell the oil for the patchouli and pot smoke wafting around Haley Barbour and Roy Blunt.  It couldn’t have happened to, uh, nicer guys.   From here on out, they’ll be making sand candles that really burn.