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.

At this week’s NAACP annual meeting, members voted to censure the Tea Party as “racist.” But it’s the NAACP that’s the throwback, argues Tunku Varadarajan.

Clearly, this bozo was reading from the memo from Mark Williams, but do the teabaggers trust a guy with such a terroristy-sounding name?  Seems so.

NAACP: Can we all agree that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cynical Politics?

Well, no.  It’s job, historically, has been to fight racism, which it quite evidently still needs to do.

The proper expansion of “NAACP” has a profoundly archaic ring to it. I know, I know: The retention of that primordial name—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—has to do with safeguarding history; and an irrefutably impressive history it is, too. But can anyone deny that the “colored” part of the organization’s name is no longer preservative of anything that is at all meaningful?

Oh, I don’t know.  The Republican Right has increasingly taken after brown people the world over, be they Hispanic, Muslim, or Black…  somebody still sees in color, it seems.  Why not the NAACP?  Further, these old-fashioned Constitutionalist guardians of (white) tradition can only declare themselves on the cutting edge of modernity to loud guffaws of incredulity whenever they try it, and this tendentious screed is certainly no exception.

Colored: Who the heck says that in the America of today, unless you’re a very, very old friend of the late highwayman (as in dedicated asphalt, not armed robbery) Robert C. Byrd? Which is why no member of this once-courageous black organization will spell out its full name. Everyone says, instead, “N-double A-CP”: To elongate the abbreviation is to expose oneself to derisive—or, worse, baffled—inquisition. (“Dad, Mom, what’s with the ‘colored’ thing?”)

Ah, toss in Robert Byrd, who long since repudiated the racist ideas modern Republicans increasingly embrace, and you can say the stupidest things and (almost) get away with it.  Well, on Fox News you can.

The NAACP, this vestigial bone on the American body politic, has thrust itself into the headlines by voting, at its annual meeting Tuesday, to censure as “racist” the Tea Party movement. (No, they didn’t.  They called upon the Tea Party movement to repudiate its racist elements, which have been both visible and numerous, so basically the whole argument is based on a lie….)  This controversial (with whom isn’t mentioned) public rebuke—delivered a day after the first lady, Michelle Obama, addressed the NAACP’s conference—has opened up a raw, new racial front in the run-up to the November elections. In effect, the self-congratulatory, post-racial Obama camp is reaching for the crudest weapon in the Democratic arsenal: the racial blunderbuss.

Well, given that all the black Republicans in America could meet in a phone booth, Republicans have nothing to say but, “It’s not me, it’s you,” which also a lie.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the NAACP is going back to an old playbook. The NAACP is resorting to the Jacksonian (Jesse, not Andrew) ploy to use the race card (a) to rally blacks to the mid-terms; and (b) to intimidate the mainstream media, so that it doesn’t report critically on a liberal administration, urging it instead to focus on the perceived sins of the Tea Party movement.

The Obama Administration, liberal?  Compared to what?  And the media is intimidated by it?  Obviously, the Daily Beast has no editors.

If black Americans are suffering due to our current economic woes, Obama’s own policies are hardly helping them. The NAACP can’t bitch about “the Man” anymore because the Man is Obama. And so instead it turns its racially monolithic vituperation on the Tea Party, which has never been in power, and has had no impact on the economic condition of black Americans—except to advocate policies (smaller government, lower taxes, radically reduced deficits, etc.) that would likely improve the standard of living of all Americans (blacks included).

This likelihood is based on what evidence?  How well blacks did under George W. Bush?  Or other non-rich Americans, for that matter?  The Tea Party ideology is, basically, to bring back slavery, but in a colorblind way, and they got a long way toward that goal over the last ten years.

In fact, the Tea Party is a greater friend of black Americans, one might say, than the administration, and is much more representative of America than the NAACP. (There are many more black members of the Tea Party—however you define that movement—than there are, by definition, non-black members of the NAACP.)

One might say, indeed, but only if one wanted to reveal himself as a lying nincompoop.

The NAACP senses—knows—that the electoral momentum is building inexorably against President Obama. And they hope to slow it by playing the race card. Let there be no doubt that nothing would have been tabled at this NAACP meeting without President Obama’s imprimatur—especially with the first lady as the keynote speaker. Our first black president—with his lowest approval ratings ever—is using his race politically, through a surrogate.

Everybody knows all darkies are connected, they said so on Fox News.

But shameless as all this is, it may have some effect. As Shelby Steele, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution, told me, “racist stigma in America is so powerful that truth and reason look meager next to it. Any populist movement—such as the Tea Party—that is predominantly white, has this vulnerability of seeming to be a throwback to the nation’s racist past.”

Ah, it seems that this diligent muckraker strolled all the way down the hall at Hoover’s Last Erection and “interviewed”  a fellow wingnut welfare recipient, which is way easier than using The Google or something to “research” the story you’d planned to write anyway.  Too bad he got some unintentional honesty mixed in with the desired propaganda.

Michelle Obama’s participation as keynote speaker could prove toxic to the Democrats in the run-up to the November elections—even though she confined her remarks to obesity and the like, and steered clear of references to the Tea Party.

In other words, nothing actually happened to support the story’s whole premise, but never mind.   The good stuff comes next:

Many in America already believe that she is a black militant in mufti, and her headlining of a gathering which cast the Tea Party as racist will have been noted by a good many ordinary, non-radical, middle-of-the-road Americans—not to mention Tea Party activists, who will be sure (and who can blame them?) to put together little YouTube packages from the NAACP shindig, cutting from Michelle O to Ben Jealous, the NAACP president who was the resolution’s prime mover.

Let’s get Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe on the case, and maybe then, with a heavy assist from Fox, such delusional claptrap can be edited to seem credible for a few hours.  Honestly, how many Americans outside of the righty fever swamps really think Michelle Obama is “a black militant in mufti?”  That would be none.  How many Americans think that suggesting such a thing is both stupid and racist?  That would be most.  But do go on; this just gets better and better.

So here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings. When race is in play, there is vulnerability all around. The NAACP, and President Obama, will learn that in the months ahead.

The surest sign of righty craziness is when they are waxing so rhapsodic about their wonderfulness that they actually call a ginned-up, Fox-sponsored astroturf organization “Athenian.”  Dick Armey probably wet himself when he read that, although Sarah Palin will undoubtedly be so impressed that she’ll announce that she can see the Acropolis from her porch.  And, like all righty diatribes, it ends with a dark threat based entirely on delusions of grandeur, with Tunku Varadarajan playing Marvin Martian, poorly, and with the same results.

Listening to Thom Hartmann’s radio show the other day, I had the glorious opportunity to hear the latest, and most repellent yet, excuse from the teabaggers days before it hit the media.  A disgusting fatass named Mark Williams, who loudly and tendentiously “represents” the fake Tea Party, completely dismissed the NAACP’s quite appropriate condemnation of the rather visible racism in the Tea Party movement, because the the very presence of the word “colored” in the NAACP’s name meant that it was racist, despite the fact that the 100-year old organization picked the name because it sounded nicer at the time than the word then most commonly in use, and “colored” people were, indeed,  sorely in need of a bit of “advancement.”  As though this belligerently delivered nonsense weren’t enough to convince anyone listening that this ape wasn’t just Etta minus the white hair and mink, he decided to further till this fertile ground and write the following on his personal blog, in the form of a mock letter to Abraham Lincoln from the current head of the NAACP.  Like Peggy Noonan, Williams seems to have a lot of best friends from beyond the grave, who agree with him, and like Etta, he always sees himself in history’s heroes:

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Admittedly, the shoddy writing veils the meaning a bit, but when you’re as dumb as Williams, posing as an imaginary darky makes you look slightly less idiotic, so why not?  The more disturbing part is that Williams believes, or is willing to pretend to believe, that “taxes” have something to do with African Americans having flat screen televisions when anyone with a grasp of the most basic arithmetic, much less economics, knows that absurd claim to be laughably false.  Like nearly all other righties, he is deluded into thinking that all problems in the world are caused by people who don’t work, usually of a duskier hue, and this creates a new, more palatable reason to hate black people than the ones advanced by his Confederate soulmates and other white supremacists throughout history.

I’ve got news for you, Mr. Williams:  Etta is dead, and America has moved on.  Whatever credence such comments receive in our Republican-coddling media, the much sought-after “Independents” will recoil in horror at such ignorant, hateful hogwash just as I did when it came out of Etta, more than 30 years ago.  The NAACP, pardon the expression, hit the nail on the head.  Yours.

-Mammy, to Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind.”

*”gentlemen” in Mammy-ese…  (as a slave, she knew what she was talking about.)

Where’s Mammy when you need her?  The formation of the Cat Food Commission is merely the latest example of the media and political class serially advancing the dunderheaded notion that the imaginary “Free Market” is not only the supposed prerequisite to less monetized forms of “freedom,” but if the “Free Market” so much as gets a cold, Democracy might have to just be put to sleep to make it feel better, and save on vet bills.  Thus, we are treated to spectacles like the IMF coldly informing us that our elderly simply have to die sooner to maintain our credit rating, and Arizona Senator John Kyl saying, without a trace of embarrassment, that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were much more important than the relative pittance it would take to keep sending $1200 per month to people tossed out of the work force by deliberate Republican policies.  Never mind that for thirty years we’ve given the “free market” everything it supposedly wanted, and got another depression to show for it, along with the sort of vaulting inequality one associates with third-world dictatorships…  You see, the only reason the market failed was because it wasn’t free enough.  (!)

The boom and bust cycles of Randian Economics are well-known and depressingly familiar.  Corporations, usually those favored by government largesse (railroads, steel, real estate, autos, oil;  the list is long of industries that owe their very existence to the taxpayer dollar….), become so large and powerful that they have enough money left over to buy the government, even as they shower so much wealth to a chosen few executives that they can buy their wives opera houses for Christmas instead of another mink.   The purpose of free market fundamentalism is laughably obvious, and not exactly new…  selling despotism and mass poverty amid astonishingly concentrated wealth as something akin to God’s Will.  Remember that ol’ Divine Right thing?  What about “Let them eat cake?”  Down the memory hole for the Chicago School boys, who of course never expect to swallow the harsh medicine they endlessly prescribe for others.

Unfortunately for Louis XVI, there was no Fox News around in 1789, and thus no one was there to patiently explain to the uppity rabble that Marie Antoinette was not just expressing All-French Values, but was also an instrument of Our Lord.  If God had meant the peasants to have cake, He’d have given them all Easy-Bake ovens, as I’m sure Tom Friedman would be happy to tell you.  The measure of national greatness has become little more than the relative comfort of the superrich, a far cry from that dreary old “General Welfare ” crap those hippie Founders sneaked into Glenn Beck’s Constitution.  Freedom died a little, you see, when Dick Cheney moved his assets to Dubai.

It’s become increasingly clear over the last few decades that the Frankensteins created by the “Free Market:” a bloated and unproductive overclass dedicated only to Midas-like self-aggrandizement, a stodgy and backward industrial sector stuck in the 1950′s, a larcenous banking elite, and a policy-driving military sector aren’t just destroying the actual free market, but in the process are stomping all over the very concept of democratic government.

Protests, so revered by the corporate-sponsored Tea Party movement, fall like trees in an empty forest when they run counter to elite goals, and even two elections wherein the public overwhelmingly voted for change have been pushed under the rug in favor of the status quo…  The wars, the insider dealing, and the transparently false memes that sold it all still persist despite their failure and ruinous consequences.  Somehow, the Market didn’t fail us; we failed it, and must pay a heavy price:  public employees, those few who still have jobs anyway, must give up their hard-won pensions, Grandma must toil into her 70′s, and health care for the poor and elderly must be put before their own Death Panels.

Of course, the wealthy overclass isn’t being asked to give up anything; quite the opposite.  For them, even the recession ended a while back and they’ve already recovered so thoroughly that now their only worry is “the debt,” meaning the rather strong possibility that someday they might be asked to cough up something for the general good, which can never be tolerated.  Poll after poll shows that, propagandized and overworked though Americans are, few see “the debt” as a problem in the face of 10% unemployment.  Hedge fund managers are taxed at half the rate of waitresses, and Republicans say that it’s the waitress who ought to chip in by accepting sub-minimum wages….

Class warfare has reached its endgame; our idle and incompetent wealthy have decided of late that the biggest threat to America’s future is having a middle class at all, and are setting about doing away with it.  In a real democracy, such a thing would be impossible, because the wealthiest tenth of society is, in the end, arrayed against the other 90%.  Enter Citizens (!) United, FreedomWorks, electronic voting, and the Chamber of Commerce, with a healthy dose of craven propaganda about the hallowed “Free Market,” and its ironclad “laws,”  one of which seems to be that Democracy only exists these days for those who can afford to buy one.

Take it away, Concern Troll:

Founded in 1946 by leading liberals such as J. K. Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Americans for Democratic Action (“ADA”) is America’s oldest liberal organization. Each year, the ADA performs the useful service of rating the “liberal” quotient of each member of Congress’s voting record based on “key” votes. Such surveys can be questioned as a measure of a politician’s commitment or effectiveness but are a reasonable indicator of his or her ideological stance on most issues which actually come before Congress. For example, for 2009, Barney Frank got a 100 percent score for his House votes while Eric Cantor received a zero score, about what one would expect.

Can you smell the pseudo-science coming?  I knew you could.  Note that he says “key votes,” which in two little words contains two nifty dodges; their behavior that shaped the final legislation regardless of their vote, and also leaves out all the less “key” votes which would utterly disprove his flimsy argument.

It will also surprise no one to learn that Representative John Boozman (R-AR), this year’s Arkansas Republican Senate nominee, also received a zero grade from the ADA for his 2009 House votes. But, in light of recent events, it is disconcerting to learn that Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) got a 95 percent score for her 2009 Senate voting record, one short of perfect. She voted for the stimulus bill, and with the Administration on every key health care vote and on every other vote viewed as important by the ADA, except for the Durbin mortgage “cramdown” amendment, which deprived her of 100 percent.

Of course, only the threat of a primary challenger made her remember, briefly, which letter was after her name, and aberrantly vote accordingly here lately.  Her previous record had to be scrubbed from this faux-academic “study,” natch, and  she also will be beaten handily by Boozman, anyway, but that’s another story for another day.

However, given the facts that: (a) she represents a southern state carried by John McCain with 60 percent of the vote in 2008; and (b) she is up for reelection in 2010, one would have thought that her voting record would have been considered laudable by liberals across the country, and that they would have rallied to support her reelection campaign against a formidable challenge, in what is shaping up to be a very tough year for Democrats nationwide. It will be an especially difficult year in Arkansas, where two incumbent Democratic House members, Marion Berry and Vic Snyder, are retiring in the face of adverse polls. But if you thought that, you would be very wrong.

This is a center-right country, after all, so what you want are Republicans who call themselves Democrats to join hands with the real Republicans, and rule the small people the way Republicans want.  It’s what Jesus intended.

In fact, Senator Lincoln was on the receiving end of a serious 2010 primary challenge from the left by Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter, who was backed by such key progressive players as the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU”), and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (“AFSCME”), and such luminaries of the left blogosphere as Markos Moulitsas (“Daily Kos”) and Jane Hamsher (“Firedog Lake”) as well as left libertarian columnist Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. Halter’s effort fell short, 52-48 percent. But, speaking for that new coalition of labor activists and the netroots, known as “Accountability Now,” which had led the pro-Halter effort, Greenwald pronounced Lincoln’s Senate record to be “awful” and denounced her as a corrupt “corporatist.”

Those pesky Greenwaldian facts are always so insulting, as most of us here have seen, (to our considerable delight, especially when the target further digs his grave by responding…) that they all but demand a response, however lame.  So Connolly (any relation to Ceci?  It would be a match made in heaven…) launches into an incredibly boring and fatuous recitation of  ”history,” which in a nutshell says that because the Democrats stupidly started liking the darkies back in the 60′s,  afterward they had to do everything else the Republicans wanted for evermore, or be consigned to political oblivion by America, which as you know is supposed to be run by the rich and white.  Watch the scare quotes, which are as emblematic of such trolls as slime trails are to slugs:

In a June 10 column, he explained that his “purpose” had been to “remove her from the Senate, or failing that at least to impose a meaningful cost on her past behavior,” such as her failure to support a health care “public option” and union backed card check legislation. But why did Lincoln’s “behavior” warrant a challenge this year when neither she nor any other similarly situated southern Democrat would have been subject to one in the past? What may be happening is a break with a tacit understanding which has governed Democratic Party politics for the past forty years. This new departure is worthy of more discussion than it has received.

Oh, yeah, we never hear about how the hippies permanently discredited liberalism, at least those of us who are blind, deaf, and dumb.  Never mind that they were right, then as now.

That understanding, to be explained below, has its roots in the Democratic Party’s Great Trauma of the 1960′s. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 44 states (all except AL, LA, GA, MS, SC and AZ) and 61% of the popular vote. It was the high water mark of 20th Century liberalism. In 1965, the Democrats held 68 Senate seats and 295 House seats and proceeded to enact a plethora of laws, including the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to higher education, and immigration reform, which liberals regard as among the greatest modern achievements of the United States government. However, by 1966, things had begun to go sour for the Great Society, with Republicans gaining 47 House seats and 3 Senate seats in the election that fall. Despite the Democrats’ continuing majorities of 247-187 and 64-36 in the House and Senate, the Republican/Dixiecrat coalition was back in control by 1967 and the Johnson’s Administration’s domestic initiatives were essentially over. By 1968, a genuine political transition was underway. The presidential election of that year is usually remembered for its background of an escalating war in Vietnam, assassinations, cultural conflict on generational lines, and racial violence, as well as for the closeness of its outcome. But one striking aspect of it in retrospect is the clear shift in voter allegiances since 1964 which it reflected. The winner, Richard Nixon, received 43.4% of the vote, while the runner-up, Hubert Humphrey pulled 42.7%, which made the election seem very close at the time. However, George Wallace, running on an overtly racist third party ticket, won a staggering 13.5% of the vote, carrying five deep southern states, including Arkansas. Right wing candidates thus won 57% of the total vote.

Only a disnonest revisionist historian could call 13.5% of the vote “staggering,” and still have to leave out Humphrey’s last-minute turn against the war that nearly cost Nixon the election, despite his phony “secret plan” to end it that gave him his lead in the first place, and as a moderate, not a right-winger.  It could just as easily be said that peace candidates won by a similar margin.  Then there’s the question of “winning,” which if you’re Nixon or George W. Bush, means flatly lying about your intentions until November, and then abruptly veering right.  The number of people who would vote for an openly right-wing candidate has remained constant, around 30%, forever.

By 1972, the shift was complete. President Nixon managed to incorporate Wallace’s 1968 vote and add more besides, winning 60.7 percent of the total vote against George McGovern. Thus, in eight years, fully one-third of President Johnson’s 1964 majority had been sheared away, losses concentrated among socially conservative white voters in the upper south and in suburbs all over the country.

Never mind the infamous shenanigans that produced the 1972 landslide, as well as Nixon’s downfall.  All Republican “victories,” no matter how crooked, are sweeping mandates for right-wing governance.

This huge alteration in voting patterns created the context of modern American politics, making the once endangered Republican party the default preference in US presidential elections. Between 1968 and 2004, the Republicans won 7 out of 10 presidential elections, with their majorities always based on the same coalition which Nixon first assembled.

The filthy rich, scofflaw industries, racists, and religious nuts….  What a proud achievement.  And of course, between 1960 and 2008, Democrats won 6 out of 13 presidential elections, which kind of negates this dubious line of inquiry anyway.

The Democrats continued to do better in Congressional elections, in part owing to the ability of what Alan Ehrenhalt called Democratic “political entrepreneurs,” i.e. politicians skilled at survival in inhospitable electoral environments, such as Tom Daschle and Fritz Hollings. But here too the trend lines were clear, with the Republicans controlling the Senate from 1980 to 1986, 1994 to 2001, and from 2002 to 2006, and the House from 1994 to 2006.

Yes, dirty politics and corruption do work pretty well, but not always, as Connolly here glumly and sheepishly admits, behind a barrage of faux triumphalism.

However, despite or perhaps because of these losses, Democrats came to understand, that there was a formula for occasional victories at the presidential level, which was essentially the same as the formula for Democrats winning southern Senate races. To win, the Democrats had to nominate a moderate centrist candidate, liberal enough to hold their liberal/labor/African American base (which exhibited great forbearance and political maturity), but not so left wing that he could plausibly be labeled a Liberal, i.e. someone associated with the least popular legacies of the sixties. Such centrist candidates would be able to capture enough moderate and independent votes to win elections. Aided by other factors, this is the formula which worked for Jimmy Carter (1976 version), and Bill Clinton. It would have worked for Al Gore in 2000 as well, but for the Palm Beach County ballot, Ralph Nader’s third party candidacy, and a partisan Supreme Court. But when the Democrats ran more forthright liberals from north of the Mason-Dixon Line, e.g. McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry, they always went down to defeat.

Here, he basically admits that a pretty significant Republican “victory” he’s heretofore been using to bolster his “argument,” Bush v. Gore in 2000, wasn’t a victory at all, nor does he explain how Kerry and Dukakis could were “forthright” liberals, or even liberals at all.

Of course, there was another election, in 2008, which appeared to shatter this political mold. Barack Obama, an unabashed liberal from Chicago by way of Hawaii and New York, and an African American besides, won an astonishing 52.7% of the vote, carrying such improbable states as Indiana and Virginia. It is this victory, in which young and minority voters played a newly prominent role, which has evidently created such high expectations in the world of left liberalism that a Blanche Lincoln has somehow become unacceptable.

Barack Obama, an “unabashed liberal?”  I bet this guy’s mother is a little embarrassed over that one, assuming she still can stand to read his work.

But did the election of 2008 actually mark a shift comparable to 1968? The 2009 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial election results and the 2010 Massachusetts Senate election shocker would indicate that the answer is “no.” It is probable that the 2008 result had more to do with transient factors such as McCain’s age, Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications, the financial crisis, and weariness with the Bush administration’s wars and perceived incompetence, than with any kind of permanent ideological shift, at least among the type of independent voters who swung for Obama, and then voted for Republicans Robert McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown in 2009 and 2010.

More “probable” scenarios that sound like they came out of Sean Hannity’s ass.  No mention of the multiple kooky teabagger-backed challengers who have and will continue to fuck things up for the Republicans; you see, it’s only Democrats that have to agree (with Republicans) all the time.

If that is the case, then the kind of primary challenge aimed at Lincoln or the third party candidacy now allegedly being contemplated to challenge Representative Larry Kissell (D-NC), are a formula for certain Democratic defeat in general elections. Unless people are motivated by a kind of nihilistic desire to punish, such primary or third party campaigns have to be based on a reasonable belief that southern states and the United States will, in normal electoral circumstances, elect people to the left of Blanche Lincoln or for the matter, Barack Obama, also now a frequent target of “progressive” criticism. As was shown in his fierce and effective campaigning for Senator Lincoln, no less an expert on southern (and American) politics than Bill Clinton obviously considers such a belief to be profoundly mistaken. I agree with Clinton, but the Democratic Party’s future may depend in part on what netroot and other liberal activists believe regarding this suddenly important question. Either the Blanche Lincolns and Larry Kissells of the world will face tough primary and/or third party challenges or they will not. To paraphrase another Lincoln, Abraham, in his First Inaugural, in the hands of those activists now rests the momentous question of party civil war.

As any such contemptible nonsense always does, Connolly’s piece ends with a concern troll’s dire warnings, based on, as usual, nothing.  Ordinarily, I’m annoyed when such purportedly “liberal” sites such as Huffpo give voice to such right-wing claptrap, but in this case, I think it’s instructive, and I’m sure it will be taken as the sincerest form of flattery by its targets, particularly Greenwald and Hamsher, who have fought the good fight against this sort of preemptive capitulation by the Village Idiots much more forcefully than they’ve bothered to fight any individual unworthy like ol’ Blanche.

Once Murdoch came along, I knew that even these vestigial benefits of the Wall Street Journal would soon run out, and that venerable name would become just another overflowing sewer of flat-out propaganda; after all, Murdoch started Fox Business because he thought CNBC was too “anti-business,” and he promised something different.  Well, here it is, from the “news” pages of the WSJ, helpfully forwarded to me by dear ol’ Nailheadtom.

Their Terrorism Problem — And Ours   [Jonah Goldberg]

When the Times Square story first broke there was a part of me that said, “Man, I hope it’s not some white militia nutjob.” When I saw the news this morning that it was a Pakistani, the same small part of me was relieved. I don’t want to speak for many conservatives on this, but I know I’m speaking for more than just myself.

Of course you know that…  You’ve been beating that propaganda drum since you only had two chins.

And, I will simply assert that I believe lots of liberals had something very close to the opposite series of reactions (here’s one small example of what I’m talking about). If this had been some Tim McVeigh type, Frank Rich would know exactly what he was going to write for his Sunday column, and he would be excited about writing it. I don’t want to say he’d be happy about it (and he certainly wouldn’t be happy about the murder victims if the bomb went off). But he would certainly be smug and righteous and full of a certain emotion that looks a lot like the glee one feels when you get to say “I told you so.”

Well, Fatass, that’s certainly what YOU would have done, and are doing now, I’d like to point out.  This liberal didn’t give a shit about the political persuasion, much less race, of the perp…  I thought that instead of retreating into my prejudices I’d wait around for FACTS, a word you ought to look up.

Now, which side is “worse” in their schadenfreude or I-told-you-sos doesn’t really interest me right now. But even if both sides were equally guilty of the tendency, it hardly means that both sides have morally equivalent positions.

At least you got that right.  YOUR side is the one that wants to keep poking the hornets’ nest so you can squeal when someone else, invariably, gets stung because of your demented bloodthirstiness.  And both sides AREN’T “equally guilty,” because only your side is so racist and indifferent to reality that everything turns into the same argument; kill more brown people.

And I’m not just talking about bloggers and pundits. This has been the project of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for quite some time. As has been discussed around here at great length, she has repeatedly discounted or downgraded Islamic terrorist attacks as everything from mere “man-caused disasters” to “isolated incidents” even as her agency has eagerly hyped the threat from American veterans and militias.  Obama himself has certainly aided in these attempts to spin away Islamic terrorism as a law enforcement issue, while he and his subalterns – including Bill Clinton —  play this subtle game of imputing that conservatives are, at minimum, providing rhetorical aid and comfort to domestic terrorists.

This would be a plausible enough argument, were it not for the fact that pretty much all of the successful, as it were, terrorists DO come from the right.  9/11 was about 14,000 bags of Cheetos ago, Pantload.  Could you find some newer material?

Are some conservatives sometimes too eager to look for an Islamic terrorist angle? Sure. Does this cause some on the right to paint with too broad a brush about Islam or to leap to conclusions about future threats? Arguably so. But that tendency is backed up by some massive empirical justification: hundreds of terrorist attacks aimed at America and her allies all over the world by known terrorist organizations that loudly proclaim their views and intentions to wage Jihad on America.

Name somebody.  Name a successful attack.  Get another Ding-Dong if you need time to think.  Hint:  Any act provoked by YOUR phony “War on Terror” doesn’t count, nor does made-up “intent.”  Better get a big box of Ding-Dongs, because you may have to go back to 1917, like your fellow nincompoop, Glenn Beck.

Now consider  Michael Bloomberg. He glibly announces on the CBS Evening News that if forced to bet on who had left the bomb in Time Square he’d bet on the terrorist being “Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” Homegrown, mentally deranged, doesn’t like the healthcare bill: These are the three best guesses of the mayor who works a few minutes from ground zero could come up with. To which I say, stick it up your memory hole Mayor.

Well, given that the hero of the day who reported the ridiculously sloppy bomb was in fact a Muslim, something Bloomberg seems to know but you don’t, and given, again, that all the terrorism lately has been from the right, I would point out that Bloomberg has a history of making good bets, especially compared to you.

This liberal tendency is not just offensive because it assumes that American citizens – including vets – are somehow an under-appreciated terrorist threat. Though that is plenty awful in and of itself.

And when did you serve, Fatty?

They’re saying, “You people need to shut up because you’re aiding and abetting terrorists.” They’re also trying to say to independents: “If you think the rightwingers are persuasive, you need to think again. They’re all just mouthpieces and stalking horses for the homegrown terrorists and the mentally deranged.”

Ahhh….  Exactly what you said during the glorious reign of Bush the Second?  Nobody actually said any of those things, of course, but the projection here is worth noting from the new Free Speech Movement on the right.

And, last, it’s also dangerous. Not because it will breed frustration and anger among Americans who feel unfairly demonized for simply voicing their objections ( though if liberals really believe the nonsense they spew about conservatives,  they might ponder that). No, it’s dangerous because it causes the country to look for terrorists where they aren’t while telling them not to look for them where they are.

Honestly.  Here I thought that a dated, untalented halfwit like Goldberg was looking ahead, with his new discovery that Hitler was a hippie, and going with it, but being intrinsically valueless and lazy, he’s just phoning it in like it was 2003.  Islamic terror exists, particularly to the extent that the Republican policy is to exacerbate it through more violence, and right-wing terror also exists, especially since the right is nationally unelectable and has stirred up a lot of gun-toting malcontents with craven horseshit.  Both are threats, but anyone who cares what Goldberg thinks about the subject is out to, well, lunch.  At KFC.

Each time the Republicans launch a new hate campaign, over the long haul the targeted group ends up benefitting, and the Republicans end up, well, toxic. The young, who are comfortable with the diversity of modern life, are invariably repelled by the antiquated, bigoted bile that spews forth, and each day another racist old coot tips over, probably while watching Glenn Beck.  One can say that anti-Black racism has enjoyed a resurgence of late, but given that we have an African American President I wouldn’t call it that much of a success over time.  Anti-gay bigotry and the mainstream acceptance of gay rights marched together hand in hand, the former nearly always paradoxically helping the latter, as well.  In so doing, Republicans probably permanently lost the vote of the two groups, by more than 90%-10%, but they considered the effort worth it.

Now, after a decade or more of right-wing demonization of “illegals,” which really just means “brown hordes,” the ever-escalating hate rhetoric of the Republican Noise Machine has driven Arizona to just go ahead and go Nazi, leaving the Republicans in something of a spot.  The media voices from FOX and talk radio will of course want to turn Arizona’s bizarre and race-conscious new law into a mariachi Turner Diaries, whereas politicians who wish to get elected in a darker America simply can’t afford to drop another, much larger and growing, demographic group into the permanent “D” column.  Once again, the Noise Machine, so lovingly tended all these years, has grown into a Little Shop of Horrors man-eater, and Lindsay Graham’s tantrum and John McCain’s pathetic waffling on the subject make clear that Republicans are lying harder than ever to get this thing out of the way, and for good reason.  Republicans just love hate campaigns when they work, electorally at least, but they’ve surely seen how these things have played out in the past, and must have access to Karl Rove’s “math” that showed that with Hispanic votes at Black or gay levels, the Republicans might want to take up golf for something to do.  They’d have hated their way into oblivion.

As a case in point, I would point to today’s gun-totin’ teabagger hoedown in Virginia today.  Speaker after fire-breathing speaker toddled up to the stage to denounce something they ominously called socialism, totalitarianism, gummint comin’ to take your guns, children, money, Suburban, and what have you.  That there is zero chance of any of these things happening, of course, might make normal people feel a bit unwelcome, but you could hardly dismiss their enthusiasm, so why not?  It was Cuckoo Pride Day, and this time not just on FOX.  (Fortunately for all concerned, there appears to be no nudity at these events…) This exciting teabagger anger entranced the media for days, since they too don’t know the difference between facts and fantasy, and thus eagerly provide both equal time for both.

Worse, the same people who had airily dismissed anti-war protesters as irrelevant, hippie America-haters who ought to be lined up and shot are now giving voice to a bunch of overweight nitwits literally howling at the moon about utter nonsense.  That the former was large, global, and correct, and the latter is tiny, parochial, and completely out to lunch merited nary a mention in TelevisionLand.  Everyone who gets on TV shouting about something or other is the same, you know, whether they’re opposing real things or made-up ones: whether there are millions of them or a few thousand.  What matters, in the end, is which side serves the ruling elite; the only legitimate anger left in our political discourse is that aimed at the profound and urgent suffering of the rich and well-connected, so the teabaggers get the airtime, since they’re dumb enough to go along, and clearly would be laughed off American Idol.

Happily, the teabaggers seem to be the final scoop for the bottom of the barrel that goes too deep, even for Republicans.  More plausible threats and scenarios, like the Soviet Union taking over the world have been replaced by flat-out bonkers things like a worldwide caliphate of collectivism, and the quickly draining pool of “intellectuals” willing to propound such horseshit have gone from, say, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Ronald Reagan to Jonah Goldberg and Erik Erickson.  And that fat lady that was on SNL a hundred years ago.

What we’re looking at is a political movement whose rejection of reality is so complete that it’s become its only defining characteristic.  Not just some facts, but any facts entering the picture go over like crabs in a whorehouse, and the mere act of stating that something actually happened, or didn’t, carries the mark of the beast.  (preferably from Kenya…)  A small but, when you think about it, disturbingly large quarter to a third of Americans simply will not believe that the sky is blue if Al Gore said so, and would go to their graves saying it was lime green paisley if that’s what Fox told them.

All this makes interesting theatre, but it makes democracy just about impossible.  The biggest and most destructive thing that all cuckoo people share in common is that:  1) they alone are always right; 2)  They have never lost except by others’ nefarious cheating, and if all evidence is against them, see rules one and two.  What’s happening on the right is that an irrational temper tantrum is being cynically encouraged by a lot of seasoned con-men rather than quelled, and as anyone who’s ever known a three-year-old, such foolhardy indulgence can only lead to bad things later on.  Sooner or later, reality has a way of rearing its head, something to which cuckoo people never take kindly, even when they aren’t packing heat.  Now they are.

Of course, Fox watchers probably would despise, say, Paris, where everyone would rightly look down on them for their obesity and bad fashion choices, and worse, they wouldn’t even be able to spit on the homeless in misguided retaliation, since there aren’t any.  Imagine their horror at seeing clean, beautiful streets, endowed with the gracious harmony that strict zoning and building codes create, punctuated by meticulously maintained monuments and museums, all funded by the commie government, which also has the hopeful audacity to provide mass transit, high-speed rail, and lengthy vacations to all of these annoyingly fit and well-dressed people running around.

If ever there were a place that would make a teabagger look even more like the unsightly, dimwitted nincompoop that he is, the Place de la Concorde must rank pretty high; hence the resentment and tireless smearing, which is getting harder and harder to support with facts.  Europeans have their problems, as do all societies, but, thanks to the American Right, they are nothing compared to what we face, so a lot of hot air must be dispelled to cover up that inconvenient truth.  The chief ways in which what Donald Rumsfeld derisively called “Old Europe” differs from “Merka,” as nearly as I can tell, are as follows:

Europeans, with the exception of Italians, aren’t ruled by a plutocratic elite that doesn’t give a shit what the majority  want.

Europeans tend to be height/weight proportional.

Europeans tend to have an attachment to home and place, something that is all but impossible in our “churn and burn,” blow and go,” society.

Chastened by historical excesses, Europeans don’t find themselves to be “exceptional.”

Europeans expect and demand that their governments protect them from corporate malfeasance, usually successfully.

Europeans accept and applaud the fact that the rich are taxed heavily, because that’s where the money is.

Europeans think Americans are dumb as posts, and fat, too.

I could go on….  Most strikingly, little of the paranoia that has affected Americans has filtered down to the European public; not just because of a somewhat less sensationalized media, but because the Continent’s social programs do make the streets much safer for not just children, but also for adults after dark.  Mayberry may never have existed, but to see the number of unchaperoned children in the streets of European cities, hell, you’d think Fred MacMurray was a closet Frenchman.

Maybe, as is often the case, I’m being too optimistic in seeing the maniacal and fact-free assault on “Old Europe” as being a good thing, but I do.  What the American right is clinging to, with increasing desperation, is the hope of fooling people into believing, without evidence, that countries that are much better run than ours aren’t as nice as they seem to the naked eye.  In this case, the truth would be as welcome to the right as a bucket of water was to the Wicked Witch of the West, and thus the only option is to lie, early and often, about these crucial differences.

How do you keep them on the farm, once they’ve seen Paree?  Well, lying helps, so does destroying the economy, and giving them another Ho-Ho couldn’t hurt.  Soon, no Republican voter will even be able to fit on an airplane, even if they could afford the ticket, and, like the fox and the grapes, they’ll figure out a way to decide that that’s ok.

Worth a try, anyway.