When you enter the alternative universe of Politico, it’s always a good idea to steel yourself against infantile false equivalencies, stunningly obvious conventional wisdom, and drearily repeated Republican talking points.  That way, you’ll suffer through far fewer poorly written articles that, like watching Fox News, will make you dumber than if you’d spent your time lighting farts.

Naturally, I go to Politico a lot, because, every once in a while I’ll happen upon something so transcendently idiotic that it makes the whole trip worthwhile.  Just now, the top story announces, without a race of irony, that Sarah Palin is Newt Gingrich’s “secret weapon.”  Given that Newt is plummeting in the Florida polls and all the Republican moneymen are openly after his scalp, one wonders what, exactly, Palin is going to do about his flagging political fortunes.  Shoot a moose?  Better yet, the “writer” quotes ol’ Caribou Barbie at some length, effectively refuting the whole premise of her story by reminding readers that the woman is, well, dumb as a post:

In her latest appearance, Palin stated: “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him via the establishment’s attacks,” she said, though the original question was about Ron Paul. “They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.”

Palin then called conservative writer Peggy Noonan “hypocritical” for recently calling Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it.”

“But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

News Flash:  Palin has picked up some new words, and has chosen to start using them, repeatedly, without grasping their, uh, meaning.  “Subscribe.”  “Via.”  “Articulate.”  “Verbiage.”  As Paul Krugman said about Gingrich, “He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”  Palin, on the other hand, is what four-year old sounds like when they’ve learned a new word.  Some secret weapon: idiotic word salad blurted out by an addlepated harridan way past her political, if not Fox, sell date.

Romney must be quaking in his Gucci loafers.

“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.

What makes Dunn’s effort, which involved extensive interviews with Palin’s friends, enemies, and disturbingly numerous disgruntled former followers so striking is that, unlike the Lamestream Media, he actually did some homework, and spoke to people who knew something about this kooky, vindictive, and ignorant woman.  Palin has left a trail of duplicity, betrayal, and ill-feelings in her wake since middle school, and always for the same reason; her pathological obsession that everything, and I mean everything, be all about her, all the time.

How could I possibly be surprised to learn that at age 13 Sarah Barracuda launched a four-year Mean Girls jihad on some newcoming girl whose crime was to be asked “out” by a boy who, unbeknownst to him, had already been chosen as Sarah’s future husband.  (Evident throughout the book, as it travels with Sarah, is that this Mormon-like obsession with breeding early and often is a new, and more than usually creepy element of right wing politics…. especially in corrupt, isolated shitholes like Wasilla, Alaska.  Teen motherhood is the new black in places that don’t believe in either evolution nor global warming, but do believe in abstinence, at least for others.)

Such magical thinking is again glaringly apparent when Sarah was running for Mayor of Wasilla, and said to a former (and typically regret-laden) supporter, “If I’m still here in this job in two years, then I’m quitting.  I mean, I better be moved on to something and better than that by then.”  The job she had in mind?  Not Governor, as the aide helpfully suggested might be a possibility someday.  President.  Seriously.  Of course, the sad part is that she got pretty frighteningly close,  thanks to nobody going up to Alaska to ask around.  The stories are multitudinous, and after the fiftieth one or so they fail to astonish; but the craziness has been there in plain sight for anyone willing to take a look.

One delicious part of the book is when Sarah Palin hooked up with a lot of understandably lonely and unattractive Republicans who had ventured up north for a Weekly Standard cruise (!), and the result was, unsurprisingly, a roomful of boners.  Fox’s Fred Barnes, who found her “exceptionally pretty,” and “unusually confident,” (yes, for one so dumb, but I digress…), said she had eye-popping integrity, which perhaps is Neocon-ese for a nice rack. Bill Kristol, a man not known for his prescience, much less sex appeal, gushed “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.”  Make it he did, undoubtedly with the frequent help of Rosy Palm, and she did end up on the ticket.

Maybe Sarah thought the National Review would bring in a more attractive crop of wingnut-welfare suitors on its cruise, and more attention, but by this time she seems to be meeting more boats than a hooker at Fleet Week, and boy did the chickenhawk sailors love her every time….   When you’re being mooned over by Robert Bork, Victor Davis Hanson, and Dick Morris, Hell… even Rich Lowry might start to look good.  But they would all write glowingly about how she walked around in high heels, was a “real honey” with “movie star qualities.” None of these snobby and pretentious members or the righty  ”intelligentsia” noticed that she is a) bonkers, or b) an idiot.  In the cynical branding Republicans practice in lieu of actually selling a governing philosophy, Palin was perfect.  For their audience, she didn’t have to be an intellectual; all she needed was a nice set of ideas.  The crazier the better, as it turned out.

The Lies of Sarah Palin was published just after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and Palin’s disastrous and thoroughly discrediting”Blood Libel” rantings on Facebook afterward, but Dunn was unwilling to yet dismiss Palin as a political force, not for good of course, but reading it, I think I am.  While some sociopaths are able to achieve big if unworthy things, this gal is too dumb, lazy, and emotionally immature to do anything at all.  Her only real “accomplishment” from her half term governorship was finally extracting revenge on her former brother-in-law, a pursuit that took nearly all of her time for at least a year, and got her reprimanded by a bipartisan investigation.  Her famous gas pipeline will probably never happen, and her approval ratings touted (falsely) by the lovestruck cruisers as “near 90%,” now only gets above freezing on a good day.  Her highly theatrical and lie-ridden veto campaign against Alaska accepting stimulus funds (well, about seven percent of them; she’d already accepted the rest) was roundly overridden in the legislature just days before her ignominious (and “eye-poppingly” cuckoo) departure from office.  They may still call her “Governor” on Fox, but I’m certain that Alaskans, and most Americans, call her something else.

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.

Mitt Romney can’t win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

As governor of Massachusetts, he signed health-care legislation that has considerable similarities to the proposal President Obama championed – the one Republicans have fought tooth and nail.

That’s an emerging bit of conventional wisdom about the slow-forming GOP race. And it’s right – except that it omits one very important fact: All – that’s A-L-L – of the Republicans considering runs for the nomination carry at least one major flaw that could keep them from victory.

The fact that Romney is the worst sort of crony capitalist, a transparent fake, and belongs to one of America’s creepier religions matters not a whit in the Village, where they read tea leaves and goat entrails to divine what trailer park America wants.  The problem is that he once did something conservative that now, with the right having leapt aboard the Crazy Train, might be considered “liberal.”  Compared to whom?

“So far, the Republican field looks conventional and flawed,” said Mark McKinnon, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush. “To beat Obama, the GOP is going to have to come up with a ticket that is fresh, exciting, unconventional and free of major flaws.”

This guy, who worked for George Bush, must know all about conventionality and flaws, but our intrepid reporter neither laughed nor did a follow up, despite the rather hilarious vacuity of his comment.

Let’s take a look at the Achilles’ heel of some of the best-known candidates:

Oh, lets.  Where did this guy learn to write?  Watching Mr. Rogers?

Haley Barbour: The Mississippi governor virtually invented lobbying – not exactly the ideal background in a very anti-Washington Republican electorate. And his Southern roots – and the gaffe he committed late last year when he seemed to suggest that the civil rights movement wasn’t a big deal where he grew up – might not play well in the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the first two nominating contests of 2012.

Yeah, but Southern Roots go over like Sarah Palin in a Confederate flag bikini with the base, a fact of which Cillizza seems curiously unaware in his one endeavor to bring up real flaws.

Mitch Daniels: The Indiana governor drew widespread criticism among the party base when he suggested that the next president would need to call a “truce” on social issues until the country moved beyond its current economic woes. Social conservatives dominate the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary – and they won’t forget Daniels’s truce talk anytime soon.

Always give a sermon before taking people’s money; it’s just like church over at the Republican party, and Cillizza makes sure everyone genuflects.

John Thune: The senator from South Dakota – like many of his Republican Senate colleagues – voted for the Troubled Assets Relief Program in late 2008. Many conservatives view the vote as a sort of scarlet letter, a massive government bailout that is anathema to their limited-government philosophy.

Really?  I don’t see Bush or any other Republicans wearing anything but flag pins, and it was their bailout.  Here Cillizza takes yet another opportunity to show how every fact needs a delusion thrown in to make it “balanced.”

Newt Gingrich: The former House speaker’s appeals to social conservatives in places such as Iowa and South Carolina could be complicated by his very public personal life: He has been married three times.

Notwithstanding the embarrassing understatement involved here, Gingrich is, more importantly, widely loathed for many good reasons, by everyone except the Village, and this particular idiot.

Sarah Palin: The former Alaska governor has done next to nothing to build a national political organization or demonstate the ability – or willingness – to grow beyond her committed social conservative base.

The fact that she’s one of the dumber humans on the face of the earth, and getting scarier all the time, is left out as though unimportant.  All she lacks organizational ability.  More unintentional humor in the WaPoo.

Jon Huntsman: His serving in the Obama administration – albeit as the ambassador to China – won’t go down well with many Republican primary voters who detest the current occupant of the White House. And Huntsman’s public endorsement of cap-and-trade legislation puts him out of step with most in his party.

Acceptance of reality never goes over well with this crowd, Chris.  Haven’t you noticed a pattern yet?

Tim Pawlenty: The former Minnesota governor’s biggest problem is a lack of pizazz. Can a candidate who is relatively unknown outside his home state of Minnesota and whose best trait is his “niceness” rise to the top of such a crowded field?

His more significant lack of accomplishments and lack of popularity at home would be more significant, but as usual, to Cillizza this whole thing is like casting a high school play, and Pawlenty isn’t lead material.

Mike Huckabee: Huckabee’s record as governor of Arkansas – particularly his decision to commute the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, who went on to murder four police offers in Washington state – is ripe for a deep opposition-research dive. And Huckabee’s record on taxes as governor isn’t likely to look much better in the eyes of many Republicans.

Ah, not quite authoritarian enough, and worse, he tried to balance budgets?

Curt Anderson, a GOP consultant who worked with Romney in 2008 but is now unaligned, argued that the candidates’ pasts won’t win or lose them the nomination.

“The answer to the riddle lies in the future, not the past,” he said. “Who can capture the imagination of Republican primary voters? That is the question.”

As we’ve seen, these voters have unusually big imaginations, making it a pretty tall order to capture them, but clearly, Chris misses this rather important point, and ends, Beck-like, with a question, of course from a Republican hack.  Enlightening.

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.

Everywhere you go today you’ll find another righty, from Sarah Palin on down, blaming crazy people for their craziness, loudly and revealingly attempting to exonerate not just their heinous words, but more significantly, their disastrous policies, which both are almost designed to precipitate just such craziness.  Nearly lost amid the narcissistic pout-rage of which Palin’s, well, “reprehensible” Facebook blather today was only the clumsiest, nobody is talking about the 12th paragraph or so of all these stories, wherein unlikely bipartisan agreement finds that the collapsing economy, lack of mental health care, and skimpy government services leave a lot of crazy people roaming the streets.  Mission Accomplished, Republicans.

It’s depressingly familiar by now that Republicans like to crash the economy and benefit politically from doing so;  in classic “Shock Doctrine” protocol, they revel in the kind of destabilizing insecurity that allows fiscally debilitating policies like the Bush tax cuts or multiple wars to be implemented, and then the resulting catastrophes make their other, even more undesirable programs seem necessary and right, leading to further disasters, crazier solutions, and on and on.  But you have to hand it to them for covering their bases.  Who knew that Reagan’s deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, punishing recessions, elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, relaxing of gun control laws, aggressive militarism, and top-down class warfare were all designed, and rather well, to serve a singular purpose?  At least until halfway through Bush’s tenure, anyway?

Well, here we are.  Unlike anything since Weimar Germany, we have all the elements required for the establishment of the kind of fascist dictatorship ol’ Prescott Bush et al longed for back in the day, thanks to a series of either conscious or at least lucky moves by the right over the last thirty years.  Shocking income inequality, massive unemployment, and widespread poverty.  National humiliation from failed military adventurism.  Crippling debt.  A two-tiered legal system that pits the all-powerful government against its lowliest citizens and leaves the well-connected unscathed.  Those horrendous, Banana Republic characteristics aren’t bugs, they’re features.  From there, all you need is repetitive, 24/7 demonizing propaganda against some easily marginalized Other and a lot of money to put it out, and you’re off to the races.  ”It works the same in every country,” as they said at Nuremburg, and as the escalating political violence and stiflingly narrow political discourse in America today shows, that ol’ Nazi was right.

You see, the right needs violent crazies roaming the lightly-policed streets to convince people that a more repressive police state would be good.  They rely on economic insecurity to goad the non-rich to learn to get by with less.  They require “Others” to blame for the serial disasters they create with such alacrity.  They even create enemies abroad, usually to simply grab resources, but just as often to make a mess that will inevitably lead to a lavish payoff, win or lose, to the military industrial complex and enable them to denounce and even prosecute their critics in a “Time of War.”   Heads they win, tails we lose.

This probably explains the extreme aversion to criticism Palin’s otherwise just routinely offensive video exemplifies….  Anybody capable of fogging a mirror could see through a blindfold that the mess we’re in, of which the Tucson shooter is just a small but telling part, is completely a Republican creation, the logical result of the fearful, fact-averse, and Darwinian society they had to have in order to realize their larger goals, and every so often, somebody is going to get killed.  That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Right wing hero Winston Churchill once described his political nemesis, Clement Atlee, as “a modest man, with a lot to be modest about.”  In a world deliberately made crazy, mostly for profit, that practically seems like a compliment today.  Given the untold horrors their ideology has produced at home and abroad, Palin and her ilk have a whole lot to be modest about, but what do you know?  They aren’t modest at all.

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UPDATED BELOW: (UPDATE V: SUNDAY)

Well, it seems that yet another mysterious “lone wolf,” acting completely spontaneously of course, has shot recently reelected Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson parking lot.  In the head.  Coincidentally, Sarah Palin has suddenly removed her infamous, crosshair-dotted congressional map from her website, and Giffords’ Teabagger opponent Jesse Kelly has, just as coincidentally, also scrubbed reference to a campaign event billed thusly:  ”Get on Target for Victory in November.  Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.  Shoot a Fully Automatic Rifle With Jesse Kelly.”  The Memory Hole is filling up fast, but MSNBC helpfully posted the video above from March of last year, when Giffords’ office doors were shot out by a teabagger yahoo.  Notice how the pudgy and brainless Chuck Todd and his bimbo sidekick both try to blame Giffords for drawing attention to the fact that the right is well, violently crazy, even when she was, unfortunately, doing no such thing.  The blue dog-ish Giffords slips easily into the “both sides do it” meme at the rather pointed direction of her interviewers, not knowing she would be, at least reportedly, assassinated in less than a year.

We do have a problem with political violence in this country, and it comes from one side of the aisle, period, the side that is most naturally violent, antidemocratic, and authoritarian.  The side that revels in war and torture.  The side that brings guns to political rallies.  The side that routinely declares that vast swaths of the American people are unworthy of voting because they’re less than fully American.  The side that immediately turns to “Second Amendment Solutions” when they deservedly lose elections.  Fox made the bed, and now Gabrielle Giffords is lying in it, along with several others.  This isn’t complicated.

Asked whether his daughter had any enemies, Spencer Giffords replied, “Yeah.  The whole Tea Party.”  Father knows best….   When we find out that the 20-something shooter was a devotee of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who believed that Obama was going to take his guns away, expect no one to be surprised except, perhaps, Chuck Todd.

More later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN news overnight.

UPDATE: Big surprise….  Rumors of Gifford’s death were at least somewhat exaggerated by our thorough, responsible mainstream media.   She appears to have come out of surgery alive and “responding to commands.”  (What, they’re already bossing her around?)  Federal Judge John Roll was among the six or so killed, along with a child under twelve.  The shooter’s name is Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who has some vague “law enforcement” background.

UPDATE II:

Knock me over with a feather; from HuffPost’s Sam Stein:

(Bold added by CH)

There will be, in the next few days, painstaking efforts to uncover and understand the background of Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. And right now reporters are generally going off of bits of information taken, primarily, from Google searches.

The most illustrative window is Loughner’s YouTube account, which appears to be hub of anti-government zealotry, obsession over currency and language standards, and, to put it bluntly, outright paranoia.

“In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” he writes in one video posting. “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver! No! I won’t trust in God!”

Here is a link to Loughner’s YouTube site.

There are also some biographical details that can be culled from the page. Loughner attended Mountain View High School, Northwest Aztec Middle College, and Pima Community College. He also appears to have been in the armed forces, at one point in time.

“Every United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix is receiving one mini bible before the tests,” he writes in one video. “Jared Loughner is a United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix Therefore, Jared Loughner is receiving one mini bible before the tests.”

If this guy isn’t a teabagger, then I’m Rudy Giuliani.

UPDATE III:

Arizona’s Cocktailhag-in-Chief Jan Brewer has this to say, on Fox News of course:

Brewer said law enforcement and government at all levels have a “shared determination to ensure justice is fully served.”

“I am just heartbroken,” Brewer said. “Gabby is ore (sic) than just a colleague, she is a friend. She has always been a noble public servant … It’s an unbelievable tragedy that the people of Arizona experienced today, one of which of course in our worst nightmares we never would have imagined.”

She added that the shooting is not something that shows favor for the state, but that the incident doesn’t represent the vast majority of sentiment among Arizonans. As is the case elsewhere, “We have disturbed people in our community that do terrible, violent things.”

I would add that she doesn’t show a lot of “favor for the state,” as they evidently say in Fox-ese, either, and that pretty much all of her supporters are, well, a little disturbed, if you’re going to get technical about it.  At least she (presumably) got through her statement without any embarrassing minute-long pauses.  On Fox anyway, she is growing in office.

UPDATE IV:

Somebody gets it.

UPDATE V: (Sunday) Rebecca Mansour, Sarah Palin’s spokesmodel, informed us that the gunsight images Palin removed from her website were, contrary to what you’d think given Palin’s ostentatious gun-worship, not gunsights at all, but, get this….  SURVEYOR’S MARKS!  Those surveyors, you know, are always reloading those thingamajigs they use, and not just to perforate Bullwinkle with a varmint rifle, but to perhaps “survey” certain congressional districts.  The most hardened Palinbot will never believe such risible hooey, but there it is.  As Tbogg would say, “Shut up, Dumb Lady.”

UPDATE VI: The right wing fainting couch is filling up, due to Pima County Sheriff Gupnick’s accurate comments above.  Get a load of this steaming pile from local right wing hate talker Jon Justice (!)…

I feel incredibly bad for our brave Pima County Sheriff’s Officers who have to serve under Clarence Dupnik. Within hours of the horrific shooting that took place at the congresswoman’s event Dupnik was telling local media that talk radio and the media was partly to blame, only to repeat his statements again during the press conference that was receiving national attention. We have no idea at this point the motivation of this murderer’s act. Yet Dupnik took his moment in the spotlight to drive a political wedge into the event. They were reckless and dangerous statements made by someone who should have known better. He should have been using his time to help bring the community together. Instead his statements made Tucson appear to be a city full hate, bigotry and vitriol. To say, as Dupnik did, that comments made on the airwaves essentially motivated this person to commit this crime is exactly what he blamed talk radio of doing, inciting through pure rhetoric. It was complete misuse of his power and he owes the media in town, TV and radio, an apology for his horrible comments in the middle of such a tragic day. He should step down immediately from his position as Pima County Sheriff.

Really.  These guys may have small dicks, but they’ve got awfully big balls.

Mohamed Mohamud’s defense team has asked a federal judge to put a muzzle on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The nation’s top prosecutor has commented publicly at least twice in recent weeks about the criminal case against Mohamud. The 19-year-old Somali-American is accused of plotting to bomb thousands of Christmas revelers at Portland’s Nov. 26 tree-lighting ceremony, a plot thwarted by an undercover FBI sting.

“Thwarted,” in this case, as Glenn Greenwald and others have ably pointed out, means “created,”  but the Oregonian glosses over this rather obvious fact.

Defense lawyers Stephen R. Sady and Steven T. Wax filed a motion on Monday asking U.S. District Judge Garr M. King to prohibit government prosecutors from making further comments about the case. They allege that Holder’s public statements violated federal regulations and their client’s constitutional right to due process.

Prosecutors have not yet filed a response to the motion.

I wait with bated breath.

Mohamud’s defense team wrote in their motion that the Mohamud case already involves high risks regarding pretrial prejudice. They alleged that Holder’s remarks went far beyond general comments about the charges against their client or a discussion of policy issues.

Jesus H. Christ, the whole frigging CASE depends for its “success” on little more than pretrial prejudice, as it was obviously designed to do, but as usual, The Oregonian doesn’t get this.  Instead, it editorialized that Mohamud’s nonexistent threat “proves” that Portland ought to get its jackboots on and join the Joint Terrorism Task Force in marching Little Beirut to the tune of the Police State drummer.  (Alone among America’s larger cities, Portland has resisted this step in the post 9/11 era, a niggling detail that sticks in the craw of the authoritarian elite…)  

“By opining on the merits of the case,” they wrote, “the government pollutes the jury pool with inappropriate opinions and prejudgments.”

Ya think?

The defense team noted that on Nov. 29, Holder told news media that the FBI had acted properly in making their case against Mohamud and rejected the notion that the bureau’s employees had made Mohamud the victim of illegal entrapment. On Dec. 10, the attorney general elaborated on those comments at a civil liberties gathering in San Francisco.

What the hell was Holder even doing at such a gathering, let alone addressing it?  Did Liz Cheney have a beauty appointment that day?

“Those who characterize the FBI’s activities in this case as ‘entrapment’ simply do not have their facts straight — or do not have a full understanding of the law,” Holder said to the group Muslim Advocates at its annual dinner.

On some level, you have to admire the chutzpah of Holder to appear before a Muslim group and presumably eat their food, too, and then spout such arrogant, errant, nonsense; it’s revealing that, at least socially, he quite evidently doesn’t share the fear of Muslims his underlings are constantly trying to incite in others. You see, the FBI glommed onto then 17-year old Mohamud, who had been fingered by his own father as a potential risk, put him on a no-fly list that precluded him working on a fishing boat in Alaska where Sarah Palin could have presumably kept an eye on him, got him an apartment, a van, a bomb, etc., and what do you know?  He morphed into the boy-band version of Osama Bin Laden, just in time for the War On Christmas.  Will the taxpayer-funded terrorist miracles never cease?

Evidently not.  Undaunted by their shameful, and costly, persecution of Brandon Mayfield, which only resulted in their wearing fascist egg on their idiotic faces (and a hefty settlement…), the increasingly desperate local branch of the FBI continues its demented, vicious, and wasteful efforts to create new terrorists out of whole cloth for the sole purpose of perpetuating their made-up “war,” of which the Mohamud “case” is only the latest example.  A similar costly and copycat case, involving another impressionable teenage nobody in Virginia, popped up about the same time, and appears just as meritless as this one, reflecting little more laudable behavior from the people who Protect Our Freedoms than you’d expect from any other shameless mercenaries in a grabby outfit trying to rack up year-end bonuses.  ”They” used to hate us for our freedom; if so, they must love us by now….

Clearly, the FBI shares America’s concern about unemployment.

Its own, anyway.