Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

As though it weren’t enough that the American people have been forced to endure, post 2010, the worst episode of delusional Republican overreach since, well, the last time Presidential candidate (!) Newt Gingrich was in the news, this motley bunch of walking disasters have decided that everything Bush did was pure genius, and they’re loudly proclaiming this errant nonsense to a public which may be forgetful, but doesn’t have the late-stage Alzheimer’s required to swallow such horseshit.  To their addled minds, Americans ought to be proud of Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and tax cuts for the rich, forever.  Worse, they should surely thrill at the deceptive and questionable legal means necessary to achieve such murky, elitist goals in every state, not just in faraway Washington.

Like the craziest right-wingers of old who mistrusted Nixon until Watergate, a group determined by Bob Altemeyer’s exhaustive examination of right-wing authoritarianism to be a reliable quarter or so of the population, today’s mainstream Republicans just glory in the idea of taking up unpopular causes against the will of clear majorities, just for the joy of getting their way.  The more people they piss off, the better.  Such a strategy does wonders with the Fox News BarcaLounger set, but it obviously must also entail a lot of expensive and politically tricky misinformation, disenfranchisement, bribery, and myriad other unconstitutional behavior, since so few support the policies they want.  So far, they’ve been equal to the challenge; since the first post-Citizens (!) United election last November, all the KOCH-purchased states have quickly moved not just to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning groups, but have also moved aggressively against Democrats’ erstwhile funders while lavishing their own with government booty.  (Not that kind of booty, openly anyway, but I’m sure it’s involved, too…)

Basically, they’re admitting that they wouldn’t stand an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning if they had to play the game honestly, so they’re choosing the Rove/Bush playbook instead, since it’s all they have, but luckily, a lot of people still remember how things turned out with Bush and Rove.  Few of the much-discussed but seldom seen “Independents” recall all of the outrages of the Bush years, hence their nutty and stupid votes in 2004, but they do know that something went horribly wrong during 2001-2009, and that Condi, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were clearly a part of it, as well as a power-grabbing, domineering executive branch that routinely treated overwhelmingly negative public opinion with a dismissive, “so what?”

We now have half a dozen states run by people that looked at the abysmal record of George W. Bush and decided that he wasn’t bold enough in ruining the country economically, socially, and morally, because he was too accommodating of his many opponents.  Basically we have a bunch of Fascist nutcases flexing their muscles who make The Decider look like Ghandi, so the media’s gotten suddenly nostalgic for the “adults” who worked for him, and started trotting them out to defend (lamely) his most revolting policies.  While this blatant journalistic failure does conveniently if momentarily  take the spotlight off of the most despised newly elected Republicans and their hijinks, it can only remind voters of the utter catastrophe of the Bush years, and its disturbingly mendacious and authoritarian tactics.

Good luck with that.  Maybe this proves once and for all that media really is liberal, and thus is cleverly playing eleven dimensional chess, but I doubt it.  They’re just dumb.

Aside from the bartender and us, the dozen or so others there were either Indian or middle eastern, and I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed when Obama stepped into the very imperial-looking East Room and, in a subtle but unmistakeable way, invoked the Bushian spirit of 9/11 vengeance, thus blandly trying to make our new version of Red Queen justice look reasonable and proper, at least for appearance’s sake.  What a difference ten years make.

If someone had told me back then that today I would be watching a Democratic President proudly announcing an international extrajudicial assassination, while we were involved in (so far) three wars and counting, I would have told them they were nuts.  Had they added that there would then be a vigorous debate about how great torture was, since it had already long been settled that wiretapping, eavesdropping, and every other form of government transom-peeping was accepted by all, I would have called them a cab home.  I’m not naive; I know that our post WWII national security/spook establishment has been running around doing all of these things for some time, but the openness, not to mention bipartisanship, about it these days is nothing short of alarming.

Maybe it was the huge screens in the bar, but Obama’s studied sobriety was somewhat belied by the scary intensity in his eyes, something I’d have liked to have seen earlier, when he was defending something, well, defensible.  He wasn’t wearing a silly costume, but it being the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, it was disappointingly evident that “change” was more a matter of style than substance.  Predictably, the large number of younger Americans who don’t remember America before 9/11 changed everything reacted as they were now conditioned to: as elated fans of their winning home team against a hated rival.  Unsurprisingly, but perhaps even more disturbingly, Obama later ratified this bloodlust with a promise to have a little ceremony at Ground Zero, where the head on a pike would be only implied as he looks toward a victorious year for 2012 as a War President.  USA, fuck yeah.  He even invited George W. to attend, but he declined.  Maybe Bill Kristol is free that day.  Or John Yoo.

It would be nicer, of course, if America’s courts would do the job, but being previously occupied declaring health care reform unconstitutional, they left it to Old Europe to point out that George Bush, by his own admission, behaved something like Idi Amin and Augusto Pinochet, put together.   But with his cowardly withdrawal from a routine Israel First conference in Switzerland that he thought he could waltz right into, Bush finally felt the whip hand he so routinely and proudly brandished for others; in effect, he’s now on a no-fly list, without ever having to fly commercial.  Better yet, he’s afraid of an honest trial, not the sort of medieval, tyrannical punishments he wreaked upon others.

This mute gesture speaks volumes about the man who in eight dreadful years wrecked a relatively prosperous and powerful nation for, essentially, nothing, except perhaps his own Daddy issues.  He recognizes, on some level, the fact that many of those imprisoned, tortured, and even killed under his administration could never be convicted in a court of law, and he could, even with all the king’s money and all the king’s lawyers that would surely stand behind him, distinctly unlike his many victims.   If you’re Bush, you just say, “Fuck Switzerland…  The weather’s better in Dallas, anyway.”   Well, usually.

In his new book Donald Rumsfeld, of all people, writes that even he questioned the wisdom (if not the motivation, unfortunately), of Bush’s immediate post-9/11 Iraq fixation, and also states he should have quit after the first torture revelations at Abu Ghraib.  Revealingly, both statements directly distance him from Bush’s most controversial policies, and clearly indicate that perhaps Rummy and the Missus have a favorite restaurant in Paris that they’d rather not say au revoir to just yet.  Rats by the dozens have left Bush’s sinking ship, and this is only the latest, but certainly not the last, example.

Bush’s Legacy Project is still beginning, and if it’s anything like Reagan’s it will be disturbingly effective, but only at home, as we will no doubt see again and again, if his storied dumbness overtakes his famous bravado.  Those Swiss, and the rest of the civilized world, are just too danged fussy.

“International law?  I better call my lawyer,” an earlier Bush once infamously blustered.  This time, the lawyer must have called him back, and given a somewhat different answer.  Mr. “Bring it on” suddenly becomes Miss “Never mind.”

Makes me want to yodel.

As the Nixon Administration collapsed under its own criminality, and with it both the draft and the Vietnam war, I felt that the clouds that had haunted my childhood had been lifted, and even if the prospect of getting rid of my older brother that way necessarily dimmed, that was still a very good thing.  The Church Commission hearings, which exposed the police state tactics of the FBI and the government in general led to important checks on government power, and here in Oregon marijuana had even been decriminalized for possession of less than an ounce.  Our Republican (!) Governor had passed the first Bottle Bill as well as landmark land use laws that protected forest and farmland from the sprawling development of the era, and one Republican Senator, Mark Hatfield, had been a staunch peace advocate, while the other, Bob Packwood, was outspokenly pro-choice, before that was cool.  (Later we found out Packwood might have had personal reasons for this stance…)

Then, along came Reagan, the first horseman of the apocalypse that is today.  Almost as soon as he took office, he made registration with Selective Service a condition of federal higher education aid, a clear signal that more wars were in the offing, and after his wife was lambasted for her extravagance and shallowness, she showed her serious side by revamping (and vastly escalating) Nixon’s failed “War on Drugs.”   Taxes were cut drastically on the rich as the military budget ballooned, and red ink flowed from sea to shining sea, necessitating savage cuts in social programs, and tales of “Welfare Queens” nipped whatever vestigial social responsibility that still existed in the middle class in the bud.

Worst of all, though, what Reagan ushered in was what I call, with a nod to one of my favorite authors of the era, David Wise, “The Politics of Lying.”   With his sunny talk of Morning in America, Reagan was able to unmoor political discourse from any connection with reality; facts did become, as he put it “stupid things,” and any politician who dared tell the truth to the American people would henceforth be rendered some sort of subversive party-pooper, and would lose.  Like his successors, he was able to cobble together the conniving rich and the religious bigots into and uneasy but enduring majority, trashing the country in the process, but what the hell?  It worked.

The “successes” of George Bush, which were many if you look at it from his party’s perspective, made Reagan look like an ineffectual semi-hippie by comparison.  Where Reagan denounced torture, Bush gloried in it.  Where Reagan attempted to salvage his legacy by negotiating arms treaties with the Soviets, Bush ostentatiously backed out of them.  And where Reagan had peppered his staff with quite a few venal cronies who personally profited by their government “service,” Bush’s administration had nothing but, right on up to his Vice President.

Being a natural optimist, I thought that these serial disasters would, once and for all, discredit the right and its dissolute and authoritarian ways, but I’ve been proven wrong once again.  Not only has Obama embraced the worst of Bush’s policies on civil liberties, war, and government overreach, but his economic policies are just as bad if not worse than those of his predecessor.  A serious primary challenge from the left, which will probably do nothing more than put a fanatical teabagger in the White House in 2012, seems the only, admittedly unappealing, prospect at this point.  All these years after the 70′s, Republicans have managed, with considerable Democratic support, to make voting all but irrelevant; we now have a choice of more of the same vs. more of the same, no matter how bad.  Makes me want to put on bellbottoms.

They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them.  Nolo contendre.

Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card wars, not torture, not tax policy, not social welfare policy, not massive fraud in the financial and mortgage markets, not massive (and up to now, largely unreported) deficits in state treasuries, not historic rot in the nation’s public infrastructure (no high speed rail in the US!), not a high school dropout rate at 30 or 40 percent (possibly higher), not a jobless rate at 10 percent (probably more than double that in real terms, and climbing) - nothing, not even a mild rebuke from one of their golden boys, David Brooks, will dissuade those representing the right from their catastrophically appointed rounds  – well what can a poor boy do?

Yet, there is perversity in this I think, real perversity in a moral sense, if one cares to look rather casually at the “tip of the spear,” where it seems the same ideology has appeared “in the heat of battle.”

DON’T HAVE TIME FOR TOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

Here is a tiny snippet which might show, in moral terms, what such hubris means to people we don’t even know.  Out there.  Over the horizon.  Out of sight and out of mind, well beyond the picket fences guarding our little castles in the shining city on a hill.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/03/wikileaks-u-s-ignored-british-concerns-over-secret-spy-flights-115875-22757887/

Oh never mind, children.  Nothing can be done, nothing can be corrected, no lives can be saved – anywhere in the world – until American tax policy is settled, to the satisfaction of the anointed ones in our midst.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#40500189

It seems like such a long time ago, when Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, performing in England, told an audience that she was “embarrassed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”  As an Oregonian I personally was less embarrassed, but I’d been routinely apologizing to foreign friends about Bush for years; he was so deliberately obnoxious, especially internationally, that any American setting foot on a European stage had to be deeply ashamed, and simple manners would mandate saying so.  To all the world save a third or so of the dumbest Americans, the man is and was a complete and utter failure.  That plain fact lies behind the fierce and immediate manufactured outrage over Maines’ remark; Rove and his henchmen simply couldn’t have people stating the obvious about their naked emperor and what a small, well, decider he had.

Like many before and since who were targeted by similar White House smear campaigns during the Bush era, Maines learned her lesson, one that, to this day, few elected Democrats and almost no one in the mainstream media has figured out: back down to a bully, and you will never see your lunch money again as long as you live.  Republicans, having not a single policy that can be honestly sold to voters, deal only in lies, smears, and character assassination; always have, always will.  It’s simply, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” updated with, “and if you do, it’s because you hate America.”  Concede to half of their kooky ideas, and they’ll still take their toys and go home, blaming you for your intransigence and extremism.  Concede to all of them, and they’ll come up with even kookier ones to demand next.  Meanwhile all the kookiness, put into action, inevitably sends the country down the toilet, and that’s your fault, too.

Why then, is Natalie Maines so much smarter than President Obama, most of the Democrats, and practically all of the liberal media?  It seems that a lot of fancy schooling was wasted on people who, tragically, weren’t paying enough attention on the playground when they were eight, and as such really oughtn’t be trusted with such responsible jobs today.  If we were to believe that the President was being honest when he said he thought he could work with the Republicans going forward, despite their loud and repeated declarations that their only goal was his political demise, then it’s time to stop talking so much about how smart he is.  That is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard, with or without Rachel Maddow’s laugh track, and frankly I’m again embarrassed by my president, who like his despised predecessor, is either lying or stupid.

One could forgive Obama’s touching naivete, I suppose, if he gets his information from TV news or, say, the Washington Post, who all still believe in fairies and bipartisanship, not necessarily in that order.  Each day since his election, the media has trotted out a rogue’s gallery of Republican retreads, washouts, and charlatans to predict dire outcomes from any policy to the left of Dick Cheney, and Obama has hardly disappointed them.  Though the unpopular Bush wars continue unabated, foot-stomping generals and unreconstructed neocons in and out of government still want more; ten years in Afghanistan has stealthily grown to thirteen or so, and several new wars have already been picked out for later, under a president whose anti-war stance was what catapulted him to the national spotlight in the first place.  Torture has been pushed under the rug, Guantanamo has been made permanent, illegal spying legitimized, Social Security only lamely defended, gays have not made any gains toward full citizenship (like Latinos), Wall Street and big Pharma have been each handed another multibillion dollar “get out of jail free” card, and huge, ruinously expensive tax cuts for the rich are about to be passed, paid for by “shared sacrifice,” and we all know what that means.  What, pray, could the righties want that they haven’t already gotten?  That’s the scary part, and to those of us not in the media it’s also blindingly obvious.

“Not Ready to Make Nice” would have been a nice and certainly more morally defensible mantra than “Looking forward, not back” for Obama and Democrats in the post-Bush era; Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Yoo, John Bolton, and all the rest are now free, not just from jail, but to go on TV every night to refight previously lost battles, quite successfully, it turns out, while Obama looks like a vacillating, defeated cipher.  How’s that bipartisan-y thing workin’ out for ya?

Obama could learn a thing or two from Natalie Maines, who refused to shut up and sing, won respect, and sold a hell of a lot of records for it.  Notice how no one’s asking her to step down.

Former President George Bush lying, uncontestedly, to Oprah Winfrey.

Behaving as though he might have a future in the Democratic party, Kanye West today apologized to George Bush for calling him a racist, even though he never did.  Back in 2005 he said, watching the Katrina debacle unfold and the Bush Administration’s shockingly indifferent response, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”  Bush, who received less than ten percent of the black vote (proving that African-Americans are considerably smarter than the white kind), also headed a political operation that deliberately suppressed the black vote in several key states, and ruthlessly attacked, at least rhetorically, all programs for the poor, nonetheless was never called a racist for these things, at least by Kanye West.  Though Bush conspicuously never race-baited the way so many of his Republican colleagues have, and continue to do, the idea that he did not, politically at least, “care about black people,” is just a fact, and West happened to say so.   The thin-skinned and ever-calculating Bush never got over such uppity effrontery, as he made revealingly clear in his unwatched and unwatchable “interview” with NBC’s Matt Lauer touting his new ghost-written “book.”

Facts, of course, have a liberal bias, so Bush had to substitute a plausible lie that turned him from perpetrator to victim, unsurprisingly enough. “He called me a racist,” the still-angry overgrown toddler whined, though he appears today quite hale and hearty compared to the hundreds of (mostly black) Katrina victims who lost their lives, and thousands more who lost their homes and livelihoods.  I don’t believe, nor does West, that Bush is a racist, personally, at least since he met Clarence Thomas.  He is what he is; another puppet for a plutocratic right-wing movement that does what it has to do to fool stupid people into supporting it, and sometimes lots of other people end up on the short end of this Republican stick, whether they be black, gay, Muslim, Mexican, or what have you.  It’s not hate, it’s just politics, and it’s equal opportunity, you know.

What’s depressing about this, which Bush’s petulant grudge-holding and Kanye West’s pathetically abject apology illustrates, is how successful the right has been with separating words from deeds through this now-trite ritual of false victimhood.  In New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and yes, if only through negligence, New York and Washington, Bush has been responsible for a great deal of death and suffering, but people are supposed to be apologizing to him, because at least they weren’t all darker-hued.  He may have always had an astonishing and well-documented indifference to human suffering in general, but dammit, Karla Faye Tucker was white, and he killed her just the same.  He may be a lot of appalling things, but racist is way down on the list.  Calling someone a racist, in Bush’s eyes, is the real sin, which comes as pretty good news to racists everywhere, as you can imagine.

Bush probably first hit upon this neat trick with lying, and simply branched out when it worked so well.  Throughout his (losing) 2000 campaign, he told a series of flat-out whoppers about everything from tax cuts to climate plans, and when they all proved to be lies, he relied on the fact that members of the media are hesitant to call (Republican) Presidential candidates liars, especially when they’re too busy calling Al Gore just that.  Lying is one thing; calling someone a liar is evidently quite another, at least in the American media, and Bush rode this embarrassingly naive reticence all the way into Iraq and reelection.  Paul Krugman finally broke the ice in 2003, in a hilarious NYT column entitled “Dead Parrot Society” that tallied up the many tortured (no pun intended…) euphemisms for Bush’s serial lying that had recently turned up in the media, and Al Franken’s 2004 book, “Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” with Bush, Cheney, and Bill O’Reilly prominently featured on the cover, felt as though someone opened a window and turned on a fan in a locked roomful of Chili Eating Contest winners.

Sadly, this calling things by their real names movement never much caught on, and Bush as well as his (to this day!) Republican water-carriers learned their lesson all too well.  If calling a famous liar a liar was worse than being one, then certainly calling an admitted war criminal a war criminal was also worse than being one, calling a bloodthirsty Imperialist an Imperialist was worse than being one, calling a complete dumbshit a dumbshit was much worse, because it drips with that hated elitism, than being one, and on and on.  An incentive has thus now been created to behave as dreadfully as possible, thereby to attract the sort of inflammatory epithets one can then handily, and apparently for years afterward, use to tar their opponents as cruel, unhinged slanderers of one’s good name.

The rest of the world, fortunately, doesn’t fall for such inane claptrap about flagrant miscreants;  high officials in Britain and Germany have already responded to the many self-serving lies in Bush’s book by more or less directly calling him a liar, even as courts around the world are finally delving into the many international crimes of his infamous tenure in office.  He, of course, doesn’t care a whit about his horrendous legacy, and has repeatedly said so, even as he so desperately tries to duct-tape it together.  By the time he hits the history books, he blithely tells “interviewers” like Lauer, “I’ll be dead,” while hundreds of thousands of his victims already are.  He needn’t fear the history books; he ought to fear the dictionary, which never lies, unlike him.

In this astonishing video, multimillionaire radio and TV Huckster Glenn Beck speaks, solemnly and with laughably faked empathy, to a bunch of rubes about how “we” are going to have to make deep sacrifices to pay off the Republican debt that faces the country.  ”We” might lose our pensions.  ”We” might lose our jobs.  ”We” might even lose our homes.  It’s time to take our “medicine,” but at least we have “each other.”  Really.  He said that, and not as a laugh line, either.  Now, Fox watchers believe a whole lot of really stupid things, but if they believe that Glenn Beck, who made in excess of $30 million last year and is a global celebrity, is going to be sharing a shelter bed with them in the coming apocalypse, one has to marvel that they are capable of walking down a street without hitting a telephone pole, let alone have spare money to throw away on overpriced gold coins.

Long ago, Republicans realized that their rich-coddling, militaristic, and elitist policies harmed the great majority of Americans, so they cannily cast about for some stupid people to bring along for extra votes, and they found them in abundance; racists, Jesus freaks, and gun nuts, few of whom will ever see any  benefit for doing so, began to vote Republican when the GOP directed, with decreasing subtlety, their appeals to them.  When Nixon spoke of “regional discrimination,” Bush spoke of “Armies of Compassion,” or Reagan launched his campaign in the ironically named Philadelphia, Mississippi, the right voters got the message without requiring them to elaborate in a way that might offend the smarter.

Trouble is, to which Glenn Beck accidentally alluded in the clip, that when you validate and empower the stupid, they start feeling (with some justification) better about themselves, and thereby conclude that their even stupider ideas are pretty good, too, and thus ought be implemented as well.  All Nixon, Reagan, and even Bush had to do was make a few signals to the stupid and then quietly go about their business, which of course was always more focused on the money end, and they could have ridden the tide forever.  Trouble was, Bush looked a little too good in his dunce cap/ flight suit, and was so alarmingly less qualified for office than virtually all of his predecessors, that he actually decided to give the stupid much of what they’d always wanted, if only to (barely, as it turned out…) gain a real election in 2004, and we’re still living with the consequences of his “success” at this malevolent  but undeniably expedient endeavor.

Bush’s loud, proud embrace of his own stupidity was initially a diabolically clever means of humanizing an arrogant  underachiever who was both a legacy at Yale and Harvard and scion of a wealthy and powerful family, but still could barely utter a grammatical, much less substantive, sentence, and, unfortunately, it worked.  People obviously didn’t think he was smart, but they nonetheless wanted “to have a beer with him,” as the ever-fawning media put it.  (Yeah, right.  More like “I’ll have what he’s having”…)  Pundits from Peggy Noonan to Maureen Dowd waxed lyrical about the uncomplicated Manliness his stupidity revealed; choking on a pretzel was all in a day’s work for a guy who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear,” although he used the word constantly, and throughout his disastrous terms a supine media dutifully translated such obviously affected non-words as “wudn’t” and “idn’t” into fit-to-print Queen’s English for the newspapers.

But all this time the rubes were watching, and now they want more, much more.  Having seen one of their own bestride the earth like a Colossus, torturing, bombing, punishing, and sneering all the way, why not now move to eliminate, once and for all, the hated smarties, and then, dummies will finally Rule the World, under the leadership of professor/doctor/whatchamacallit Glenn Beck, oracular Rush Limbaugh, and Haiku authoress Sarah Palin?   Well, because that’s a little too stupid.  Big GOP donors don’t work for free, you know, and somebody’s got to pay for that Free Market, after all.

So today Republicans, to great fanfare, released their “Pledge to America,” a tired, rehashed pile of manipulative, war-mongering horseshit written by a lobbyist that only aims to increase the wealth of the wealthy and the suffering of everyone else, returning to the traditional Republican ignoring of the stupid, and it went over like a fart in church, literally.  Only the wealthiest of the religious nuts like Gary Bauer found much to love about it; Erick Erickson, Laura Ingraham, and many others denounced its lack of emphasis on something they call “moral values,” while remaining guardedly optimistic about how much cash the rich (like them) were slated to rake in if it became law.

Beck, of course, amply demonstrates that the stupid on which Republicans have long depended  has now gotten a bit out of hand….  How can Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, et al survive if we really went back to 1908 tax levels?   Is it considered smart to tell a lot of stupid people that imminent loss of their jobs and homes, if they haven’t lost them already, is somehow a good thing?

It’ a long way from “Morning in America,” it seems, but in the end you have to dance with the ones that brung ya.  Good luck with that.