Murphy's Law

First, a confession.

I have to admit, when I took the clownish charlatan Glenn Beck in my sights more than a year ago, I frankly underestimated his influence and staying power (or, to put a finer point on it, the unfathomable gullibility of the many million who follow him).

I couldn’t put it any better than the good doctor (MLK, that is) did: Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

So if I am a bit surprised to see Beck’s cult of personality disorder grow, it remains entirely too simple to trace his dubious lineage:

Think of phony purveyors of moral outrage ranging from Morton Downey Jr. to Jerry Springer, and the whole concept of infotainment to the hastening-of-the-apocalypse proliferation of Reality TV. Stage it and they will come is now the (un)official mantra of media’s M.O. And, in the end, it’s all pretty much a tempest in a teapot. Or, a tempest in a tea party. Which brings us to the unbelievable Glenn Beck. Of course, fabricated indignation has been good business in America since Jonathan Edwards first perfected the formula with Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God back in 1741, shortly before the advent of cable television.

Capitalizing on the nervous consciences of the faithful created steady work well into the 20th Century, and Sinclair Lewis codified the archetypal character in Elmer Gantry (1926). That pernicious tradition was carried on faithfully by Confidence Men like Pat Roberston, Jerry Falwell, Benny Hinn and Rick Warren. But of course this act has always been too tempting for politicians not to embrace with every inauthentic bone in their bodies. The only hucksters that can outhustle the pols are the preening simpletons who rile up the credulous citizens who dial in each day for another dose of bad medicine. At the appointed hour, the idiot box transfigures into a burning bush and these rapt minions who otherwise behold Christ in their breakfast food (or, proving how crafy and omnipotent the Lord can be, at  lunchtime too), get their Godhead on in the form of a third-rate carnival barker.

As incendiary, and insufferable, as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are, you tend to appreciate how they sometimes can’t keep a straight face as they shovel the horseshit, whipping simpletons into a righteous lather for a steady paycheck. Yes, they are contemptible and yes, they wield their petty power over the powerless in incredibly irresponsible fashion. But with them you know to expect less than little in terms of originality, integrity or intellectual rigor. Thus, you have to remain content, in a free country, to let them hold sway over a semi-retarded audience who would crawl over molten coals for them. And to be certain, Glenn Beck’s senseless sensibility makes those two blowhards look like oracular paragons. He is an empty suit with an empty mind, offering regurgitated jeremiads and faux populism to a genuinely distressed viewership looking for answers but disinclined to trust the dirty Socialists currently in power. His histrionics are comprised of two primary objectives: to position himself as a voice of reason in these troubling times, and to use a time of crisis as the impetus for his own existence. If Beck was capable of experiencing even an infinitesimal measure of shame, he would combust quicker than a drummer from Spinal Tap.

More from that piece, here.

I’ve spent more time than might seem sensible trying to understand or explain (or, more often, excoriate) the prevailing sentiment from the types of people who would actually drive great distances to attend this past weekend’s “rally” here, here, here and here.

Having followed this phenomenon since Obama took office, I’m distressed to conclude that it’s going to get worse before it gets better (and even more depressing: it’s likely to never get better again; we are in a unique –and uniquely awful– place in many ways as a country right now, and while we remain at a crossroads of sorts, economically speaking, it is appalling to conclude that an entire political party is unwavering in its dedication to do everything possible to stymie growth and awareness, and stoke the flames of resentment and ignorance amongst its base).

But I’m more certain than ever that while the G.O.P. eagerly eyes up the cynically won votes it is certain to garner in November, beyond power and money, the primary motivation behind this carefully orchestrated (and generously bankrolled) “movement” is to render more and more people frustrated and indifferent.

Not sure I have any updates on a few of these observations I’ve made during the past year or so:

An ostensibly rhetorical question I read (and get asked) quite often these days is “Why bother?”

Why bother getting invested in politics?

Why bother reading all those papers and blogs and magazines?

Why bother wasting time since they are all the same?

Why bother voting?

Well, there are lots of good reasons, some of which are immediately evident to anyone who takes the time to be moderately informed and is aware of not-so-complicated concepts like cause and effect. That the policies of our former administration (and, more importantly, the power-to-the-powerful ideology that informs those policies) bankrupted our nation and –this is the toughest one to grasp– made us less safe is not a matter of opinion; it’s not debatable and there is no room for any possible nuance.

Also, there is only one type of Socialism being practiced in America today and it has been in effect for longer than one year. It’s Corporate Socialism. For evidence to support this claim, I submit every action taken by every Republican politician since 1980. Case closed, your honor.

To the haters, I certainly feel your pain, to a point. Yes, watching the Democrats try to govern is an often painful and occasionally pitiful spectacle (it’s amusing: Harry Reid is at once a man who should never, under any circumstances, have gotten involved in politics, yet he is, in the final analysis, the prototypical politician). Of course, in their defense, a reasonable person understands that actually attempting to govern is messy, difficult and frustrating. Particularly, as people like Andrew Sullivan regularly point out, our nation has become increasingly ignorant, self-absorbed and childish: we don’t want any government interference, we don’t want to pay taxes and we demand to see all of these pesky problems go away and take care of themselves. (Or even better, the stance of the Ayn Rand worshipping Libertarian-leaning bozos: just leave us alone and the world will govern itself, but if my house catches fire or a burglar breaks in or the roads need to be plowed or the country is attacked some non-tax funded enterprise better be at the ready to protect me!)

We have become a country of children who want to skip the main course and go directly to dessert, every meal, and then complain that we’ve gotten fat. And that in itself is a problem: that allows the Republicans to continue to frame the idea of shared accountability and responsibility as an inherently negative or intrusive notion. Let me be clear: that is, upon cursory inspection, a decidedly anti-American sentiment. The idea that paying taxes and supporting regulation of the food we eat and air we breathe is some type of burden implemented by a leering Big Brother is beyond moronic and borders on offensive. The idea that we can have no taxes, no regulation, no government involvement, unfunded wars and private interests in charge of everything  is exactly the intelligence-insulting ideology that landed us where we are now. And, for the last time, and as Thomas “What’s The Matter With Kansas” Frank elucidated, vigorously endorsing the notion that the wealthiest .01% of the population should not pay any taxes is going to put exactly zero cents in your pocket and create precisely zero jobs.

As anyone with a sliver of sociopolitical awarness can attest, many of these Tea Party puppets have genuine and understandable gripes. The dilemma, as anyone with a modicum of historical awareness (and proximity to reality) understands, it’s precisely the policies and obsessions of the GOP that took us from boom to bust in unprecedented and appalling haste. Less than a year ago, one of the only redeeming aftershocks of the Great Collapse was that, at long last, the “free market” farce of voodoo economics, which had reached its unfettered and full flowering during the Bush years had crashed and burned so spectacularly and unmistakably, at least, finally, we had black and white cause and effect for those misguided, irresponsible and demonstrably immoral policies. Ah, but how quickly those least-served by these policies forget! As usual, as ever, it was the taxpayers (!!) who got stuck with the tab, and now we are waist-deep in a massive recession and jobs crisis.

Suddenly, fiscal restraint is the operative priority, and these same charlatans who borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow are decrying the same stimulus they initially supported (that same stimulus that may have kept unemployment from growing to 25% and causing a genuine Depression with a capital D). Rome is burning and the right-wing spin-pigs are not just fiddling, they are actively promoting disinformation and stoking the aforementioned fear and loathing. Not that the idiots foaming at the mouth at these tea parties understand the ways 2+2 =4, in part because they can’t count to four.

The GOP, led by the Tea Party Queen who, displaying her ceaseless loyalty to the “real” Americans whose pain she is profiting from, continues to enjoy those hefty speaking fees, presumably just to keep it real. And if she’s not whipping up the lunatic fringe into a lather over the manufactured controversy at Ground Zero, she is articulating the ways policies extending  unemployment benefits are part of a big government takeover by the Socialist president. And it works. Put us in charge again so we can kill some more jobs and bankrupt the rest of your 401-k and after that, get busy privatizing social security. It’s real America, all right. Real dumb America.

(If you find yourself discussing these matters with a Republican friend who claims to be appalled with the way Obama the Socialist is saddling future generations with mountains of debt, feel free to refer to this (taken from a must-read article by David Leonhardt article):

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.)

So, in sum, yes it is discomfiting to watch the Dems go about their business. But then you look across the aisle and see the obstreperous opposition digging in with monomaniacal zeal to do nothing. (You have to hand it to them, though, stoking the “Tea Party” frustration, which is largely a result of the situation their actions put this country in. It is imperative to recognize, and point out as often as necessary, that the same sadists pulling the strings in the not-so-big GOP tent are mostly angry and embarrassed because they got beaten, that’s all. There has been nothing approximating a concerned or sober investigation of what went so dreadfully wrong as a result of bellicose foreign policy, the reckless (and expensive) launch of an unnecessary war, or the thoroughly debunked and shameful worship of free-market, voodoo economics.

Nonetheless, if Obama is half the man History is setting him up to be, he would do well to dedicate all of his energy and eloquence toward making good on the promises he already made. We can hope for more, but we should expect no less.

This is why you have to choose sides. This is why you can ill afford (literally and figuratively) to let these cackling, wealthy and well-insured weasels lull you into a state of impotent rage or, worse, apathy. Because aside from the ceaseless corporate welfare they will fight for, their ultimate ambition is to render the actually literate and sentient amongst us fed up and indifferent. Without awareness, and with no resistance, they can more easily continue their unchecked assault on our collective well-being.

This just in: Newt gingrich remains the most repugnant and despicable ass-clown in America!

(Narrowly edging out the oleaginous Andrew Breitbart, who may finally have done civilization a favor by making himself impossible to take seriously in any respectable circles.)

In terms of offensiveness, illogic and opportunism, the insufferable one may have outdone himself here:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

And lest anyone think I’m shooting a pale, bloated and loquacious fish in a barrel, let it be known that I’m actually offering Gingrich more than a little benefit of the doubt. I am inclined to believe that he knows better and says most of the things he says (trying to be incendiary, ending up being insidious) to stir the sluggish pot of ditto-heads, “Don’t Tread On Me” types, and the no-taxes troglodytes who invariably live in counties most reliant upon the largesse of government and well-paid (and heavily taxed) liberal elite socialist sorts. Indeed, I have no choice but to conclude he knows better, because the irony (and idiocy) would be too unbearable if this bozo, who constantly invokes his authority on founding fathers (always wrongly, such as his demonstrably incorrect insistence that men like Jefferson and Washington were devout Christians and, more, designed the new country to be a “Christian nation”—which is literally the opposite of the very documents they created) actually believed the garbage he so often spews.

Check it out: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Pretty hard to misinterpret or spin, no? Not unless your audience consists of the willfully illiterate and mouth-breathing masses who turn to Fox news for a quick fix for what (Roger) ails them. Any serious thinker who hopes to be taken seriously does everything in his power to avoid leaning on the ever-reliable George Orwell, but sometimes no other analogy will do. In the intellectual wasteland that passes for the Republican party these days, down truly is up and night really is day. Only in this contemporary dystopia on the Right could anyone with the ability to reason (or read) fail to understand the difference between what the founding fathers wrote and fearful bigots fantasize about.

It became increasingly obvious (and unnerving) during the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the ’04 election that nothing would please the religious right lunatic fringe more than to essentially become honky Taliban. Of course they would be aghast at such an offensive characterization. But think about it: these are the same sociopaths who endorse an oligarchic state (a bathtub-sized government run by the untaxed and unregulated wealthy), covet the conversion of all to Christianity (not, incidentally, the type espoused by Christ but the type reformulated by white, often closeted gay men lashing out against their own uncontainable impulses), and openly proselytize the possibility of a single preferred religion. (The peripheral analogies include the behavior and attitudes toward women, the dispossessed and impoverished, the zeal for censorship, the defense of government spying and the embrace of anti-intellectualism. As Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens have pointed out without hyperbole, these are all genuine hallmarks of Fascistic ideologies.)

Bottom line: equating the tolerance of a Muslim learning center with “submission” and an indication of the “timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” (in addition to being a profound case of transparent projection), is a craven and fallacious misnomer that needs to be forcefully called out, and rejected. Indeed, if this disgusting sentiment was translated into another language and placed in a thought bubble above any ayatollah, it would seem like the ranting of an intolerant dime-store despot. Which is exactly what it is.

It almost makes you want to sardonically cheer Newt on and see how the dots connect, down the road, with the hard lines he endorses and how their implementation would affect ordinary Americans. Why stop at establishing (or rewriting history to assert there was) an official religion, let’s begin slicing off thieves’ hands with scimitars; let’s make certain types of artistic expression illegal; let’s throw rocks at adulterers…oops! See what happens, Newt? When you crawl out from under your rock and use it as a soapbox, you are eventually and inevitably hoisted by your own petard. And Newt, as much as any self-righteous offender, is serially petarded.

Of course the other, egregious fallacy of Newt’s outburst is the notion that the world is (or ever was) split into “us and them” (certainly it is if you are indifferent to and frightened of the “Other” and seek to divide susceptible citizens for naked political gain); Americans are Americans (presumably white Christians, natch) and Muslims are Muslims (presumably dark-skinned jihadists). This willfully ignores the fact that Muslims, as well as myriad other religions, cultures and creeds, all exist peacefully and democratically in the United States of America. Your average second grader is capable of understanding this, but not your average Tea Partier—which is exactly what Gingrich, with the subtlety of a raccoon in a trashcan, is relying on. But this underscores the always-ugly underpinning of the contemporary conservative mind (which is not terribly evolved from the historical conservative mind): the facile (and fictional) formulation that our great nation—a nation comprised of and built by immigrants—has a preferred demographic. Not so ironically, the only time this explicitly was the case happened to be (mostly in the south) during the sordid spectacle of slavery. Implicitly, that bias still extends to women, as well as non-whites, but in virtually all legal and moral respects, that type of race-baiting bigotry is discredited on arrival. In today’s right-wing sprint to the bottom of the tea-pot, this is the fuel that drives the cause. But like that other cause so fondly (and wrongly) reminisced about in certain quarters, it is a lost one and tends to spoil when exposed to the direct light of reality.

Let’s cut to the chase: I would wage considerable sums of money that there is no chance Newt could ever weasel his way into the nomination for 2012. Frankly I don’t think God loves us enough to make that remote possibility a reality. However, few things would provide me more pleasure. It might even be worth praying for.

Memo to Sarah Palin: when Lady Macbeth cries “Out, damn’d spot!” she is not talking to her dalmation.

I found Sarah Palin’s latest tearjerker invoking William Shakespeare particularly interesting on two levels (and, I say tearjerker in the sense that her indefatigable self-promotion combines with illimitable delusion to produce these types of comments, which at once induce laughter unto tears which then prompts one to weep for our future). First, it was, of course, The Bard who wrote the following lines, which demand to be quoted in full for a variety of obvious reasons:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I know, right? (This is life imitating art, super-sized.) But second, it is more than a little appropriate to consider that the other great William (Faulkner, that is) utilized this poetry for the title of one of the towering literary achievements of the last century, The Sound and the Fury. It is amusing (aside from the audacity) that Palin likens her creative license (or that of the semi-literate cadre of ghostwriters who Tweet for her) with masters of the form who on occasion changed the language. The difference, aside from the fact that they could actually speak the language with no small degree of proficiency, is that for artistic folks who innovate and advance our template for communicating or creating, one must already have mastered the fundamentals. This is demonstrably true of Slick Willy (Shakespeare) just as it is true of will.i.am (Faulkner), as it is true of Salvador Dali or Ornette Coleman. Can you dig it?

Sarah Palin is in what seems to be a historically unique position in that the more she embarrasses herself, the better it turns out to be for her career. And bank account. Sarah Palin is hated and loved in equal measure, always a good niche market. And she is popular, to a large extent, because her legion of dimwitted acolytes find, in her looks, attitudes, pronouncements and propensity for faux pas (faux pi?), a reinforcement of many things they want and need to believe. She is popular the same way boy-band pop stars are popular: she sells copy because the things that come out of her mouth are the things that a great many people want to hear. There is a formula for insipid pop music and there is a formula for pseudo-populist hucksterism.

What is different about Palin—and what makes her dangerous—is that while virtually every move she makes is calculated and carefully calibrated to resonate with the semi-literate and unreflective Americans whose bigotry is set on cruise control, she is not entirely disingenuous. Indeed, the things that most annoy the principled, learned and sentient citizens happen to be the things that are unaffected and/or unrehearsed. That is, her astonishing, almost impossible-to-properly-fathom ignorance. But that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan (whose amiable dunce routine, in fairness, looks downright Socratic after eight years of his Vice President’s son and Palin’s scorched earth ill-will tour). The problem, now, is what we have wrought as a nation with our voracious appetite for insipidity: being dumb is not only no longer an obstacle, it is a short cut. People like Reagan (and, to a lesser extent, his V.P.’s son) had to work hard to overcome their manifest intellectual shortcomings. Imagine how much time and energy is freed up (to fundraise, for instance) if you no longer have to fake it ‘til you make it. Think of how inordinately liberating it must be to celebrate—and be celebrated—for keeping it unreal on the campaign trail. Consider how much more confident one can be in one’s untested and uninhibited convictions if one never has to explain them.

I don’t blame Palin or her fans for this phenomenon. The staggeringly unenlightened have always been amongst us; mostly innocuous platforms like Facebook and Twitter have just given them more ways to connect and commiserate. No longer do misguided cretins have to conduct solitary diatribes in their attics or consult with their tinfoil hats in a dark room; now they can plug in, connect and blame the godless, the gays, the immigrants and the evil machinations of Socialist-minded social servants with one hand comfortably snuggled in the bag of Cheetos. They can incite riots and excoriate the elites without even leaving the comfort of their recliners.

But I suspect that even if social media (and, of course, the Internet) had been available two decades ago, an unabashed simpleton like Sarah Palin could never have made it out of Alaska back then. And for this I blame our disintegrating, increasingly useless mainstream media. The only thing liberal about today’s media is the appetite they have for horse races and sensational gossip over more mundane matters like what policies (take health care reform) actually contain and who they actually benefit, or making readership aware when a particular pol or pundit is straight-up lying. But we know this is treacherous ground to tread because, as Dr. Stephen Colbert established, the truth does have a liberal bias.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin’s latest crime against the English language and (more distressing) cocksure condemnation of racial and religious intolerance. No, not her own, but the ostensible hatred a certain ethnic and religious group harbors. That would be Muslims or, in Republican parlance, towel-heads. You see, because of 9/11 Muslims hate Americans, want to kill us, and their religious beliefs—and those who practice them—are violent and insidious. They also are not white or Christian, which is two strikes against them from the get-go. But this manufactured outrage over a Mosque in New York City is actually a teaching moment. In one imbecilic sentence, Palin is illuminating the misguided thinking that even allows someone to go there. Rather than attempt to disentangle the convenient (and conveniently backward and bigoted) sleight of mind that can equate Muslims with terror and a Mosque with violence, let’s try to use this insulting illogic in another scenario where Palin currently applies it. Below we have an image of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. As my perspicacious friend Tony James reminded me, Timoth McVeigh was Catholic, so clearly we need to tear down St. Joseph’s Old Cathedral (indeed, the proposed Mosque will be two blocks from Ground Zero; this church is practically across the street!). Needless to say, the average American redneck cemprehending that comparison would be as conceivable as the average Christian conceding that Jesus wasn’t, in fact, a honky.

Instead, the focus has almost entirely been on her beyond-W butchering of English syntax and no one (outside of the progressive blogosphere which, while useful and necessary, is mostly preaching to the choir) seems terribly concerned in addressing the racist and moronic reasoning that would even lead one to endorse such backwards thinking. (That said, it must be mentioned that the collective genius of humanity has rallied in a time of need, and is busy at work on Twitter making appropriate mockery of Palin’s bungle. Enjoy the hilarity @ #shakespalin.) Naturally, the emphasis has involved a “discussion” of whether she intended to make up a new word (duh) or whether we should take it seriously (DUH). Less than a little effort is made to remind anyone that everything she is saying is historically wrong, mean-spirited to the point of psychosis and flat-out racist. One could also make a case that she is persecuting another group’s religion, something Christians, for all of their whining and “War on Christmas” crapola, should be at least a tiny bit sensitive about. Of course, as we know in America the only groups who are genuinely persecuted are white fans of Jesus and billion dollar crybabies who pay too many taxes (Ha).

(Sidenote: it is either disconcerting or enticing—and possibly both—to consider what would happen if people like Palin and her ilk were really forced to sit down and actually read the bible or the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) and understand who Jesus really was (even as a fictional character) and who the founding fathers really were (based on the things they actually believed and wrote which, unlike the authors of the bible, bear their signatures). Would heads explode? Would pre-packaged ideologies, at long last, suffocate on their own fumes? Would something approximating enlightenment ensue? Would reading lessons be necessary first?)

A prediction: There is an unforseen silver lining in all of this. Most of us have suspected for quite some time that Palin is the de facto leader of the G.O.P. brand; the only people unwilling (or understandably unable) to acknowledge this are the insiders and party elders themselves, who have so much to lose if and when she ultimately steps out of her Fox-News bunker and pre-scripted press releases (which she calls speeches). Once she puts herself in the proverbial crosshairs of even cursory (and at that point inevitable) media scrutiny, the lies will unspool and the façade will crumble and a modicum of sanity will be restored to our woeful world. And along the way the unthinkable will happen: the Republican contenders will necessarily have to go on the attack. That is when things will get very interesting indeed.

And people will write about it, we will laugh about it, and we will do everything in our power not to learn from it.

ON THIS DAY:

On May 25, 1925, John T. Scopes was indicted in Tennessee for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.

I always enjoy the chance to invoke the incomparable Bill Hicks.

And of course, I relish any opportunity to break out my favorite image ever:

But it’s not all that funny, really. I mean, we laugh because there is much to laugh at. You have to laugh at these simpletons who want to “bring our country back”, meaning the good old days when blacks and women knew their place, homosexuals dared not show their faces in public and the bible held firmer sway over a greater portion of the populace. Presumably these same tea baggers and bigots don’t want to also bring back cars without air conditioning and houses without running water, smallpox without vaccine and surgery without anesthetics and a few dozen other of our least favorite things from a time when the world was a whiter shade of pale.

And it’s not at all difficult to connect the dots between the type of magical thinking employed by the bible thumpers and the Ayn Rand-obsessed Libertarian lunatics (how perfect –and appalling– a commentary on the cultural Koyaanisqatsi we are currently struggling through that the son of the Libertarian’s savior is named after the most humorless and phlegmatic popular novelist of the 20th Century. Painfully popular. And imperceptive. (And influential. Right Alan? Atlas shrugged; Jesus wept.) Indeed, the only redeeming thing I can think about Ayn Rand is that she partially inspired one of Rush’s great early albums.

It’s times like this that I wish we actually had a Democrat in The White House.

Just kidding. Sort of.

I mean, if there wasn’t a better teaching moment than right now, when has there ever been? Between the ongoing Wall Street debacle (and the toothless “reform”) and the state our the-only-thing-better-than-less-regulation-is-no-regulation former administration left our country in, we are presented with the ultimate, ugly fruit of that mentality, the BP debacle. Or should I say, the still far-from-resolved BP debacle? Actual regulation on the disgustingly rapacious financial, housing and oil industries would have easily obviated all of the recent catastrophes. Catastrophes that we will spend generations paying for. Put another way: the only people who have gotten rich in any of these three arenas are the people who depend upon other peoples’ misfortune to make a profit. And, of course, there are large segments of our country fired up and ready to march defending these sociopath’s unfettered right to exploit and destroy.

See, the thing about teaching moments is that people need to be teachable; they need to be capable of being taught. And a distressing number of Americans right now have already determined that everything they need to know is contained within the (literal) words of the bible, or is best expressed by the (backwards and demonstrably untrue) proposition that there’s nothing the government can do that the free market can’t do better.

Yet, as depressing as it might be to consider how far we have to go, it’s helpful to think about the distance we’ve travelled. Take a look at the recent CNN poll, indicating that 8 of 10 Americans have no problems with gay people openly serving in the military. Could you have even fathomed this possibility back in November, 2004? (That, you may recall, was just after the G.O.P. successfully cock-rocked the vote, whipping up the Red and Blue state hysteria concerning all-things-homosexual. It seems safe to suggest that this disgusting –and disgustingly effective– strategy has finally reached its expiration date, and in our lifetimes we’ll look back in disbelief at how gullible, intolerant and imbecilic we were around the turn of the century. The way most of us today regard our legacy toward civil rights. Right Rand?

So there has been progress. And the good thing about evolution is that no matter how slow it might be, it is inevitable. Although, I wonder if the recent paradigm shift regarding gay rights has less to do with enlightened acculturation and more to do with the fact that in the last six years we’ve gradually discovered every priest and Republican politician is queer as Charles Haley. Just kidding. Sort of.

Therefore on a day that we remember the struggle to teach evolution even as we struggle to teach ourselves how to evolve, I’ll abjure originality and invoke a tune entitled…Evolution. Assessing this great song from the great Cat Power’s great album You Are Free (which I opined was the 4th best album of the past decade), I offered the following thoughts:

But in the end, “Evolution” is the ideal song to close out the set. More, it’s one of the best closing songs on any album, ever. More, it may just be the song of the decade: thematically it is elegiac but in its yearning, deeply human resolve, it is inevitably inspiring. Another duet with Eddie Vedder, I am unable to express the heights this tone poem attains. Just piano and two voices, one sounding like the other’s shadow, Vedder echoes, encourages and reinforces Marshall’s fragile invocation of witness and perseverance. The pair go through the lyrics one time, pause and recite them a second time, ending with a subdued but urgent call to arms, repeating the words “Better make your mind up quick”. They are talking to themselves and, one slowly realizes, addressing anyone else who might be listening.

Yes, there is nothing new under the sun but you sure never get used to the smell.

Check it:

Rep. Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who resigned today over an affair with a staff member, said he doesn’t want his “mistake” to be used “as a political football in a partisan attempt to undermine the cause for which I have labored all my adult life.”

…Souder then touts his efforts to prevent Indiana schools from being forced to hire “transvestite teachers.”

Just two weeks ago, Souder won a competitive primary with a classic anti-Washington, family-values campaign.

My first, instinctual response, was predictable as it was obligatory: political football? You mean like running campaigns based on fear-mongering, “family values” intolerance? By constructing bogus or hysterical strawmen (tranvesite teachers, in Indiana? Really?) in order to trumpet one’s implied moral superiority? Et cetera: at this point in time, this shit just writes itself. Indeed, it’s practically gotten to the point where if a Republican protests too loudly about preserving marriage, you know they have had, or will have, an affair. And the more they talk about the evils of homosexuality, (or use words like tranvestite) the more certain we can be that they will be caught with a male escort, I mean luggage handler.

But here’s the thing: how upset can we (or should we) really get with these imbeciles? They are, after all, being who they are, doing what they do. For the umpteenth time, we should focus on the real problem, which is that people actually elect these assholes. Let me repeat that. The people being pandered to in order to extract votes are endorsing what they want to hear, they are hearing what they want to know, and they know what they want to need. These are the people whose kids can’t read, worried about transvestite teachers talking about evolution. It is, of course, outrageous, but it’s mostly embarrassing.

For us, not them. This will work out to be a great career move for Souder. He’ll inevitably write a book (discussing how this experience made him closer with God and God gave him this opportunity to help others heal) and the same simpletons who voted him into office will put his boilerplate “redemption story” on the bestseller list. Book it.

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: David Frum, the dude who used to write speeches for the worst president we’ve ever endured, has written the most lacerating epitaph for The (Tea) Party of No, here. The entire thing is a must-read, and the closing paragraph demands to be quoted in full:

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Here is the really ugly part: Frum is not Monday morning quarterbacking. He was practically pleading with anyone who would listen how (self) destructive this unified and unyielding obstruction would be in both the short and long term. In fairness, the G.O.P. had deluded itself into thinking that the fantasy they were spinning was gold, not shit. And there were plenty of cowards and co-opted folks in the media and inside the Democratic party who still hadn’t figured out how to stand up to bullies. (Instant update and mid-post edit: holy shit, look who just got “terminated” by AEI. You really can’t script this stuff better, and how made-to-order this full-scale Republican implosion is unfolding. Can you say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? Holy shit.)

Of course this problem was exacerbated in no small measure by Obama himself being way too cool and detached on the sidelines as the Fox News and RNC fear factories spewed out their garbage and took control of the narrative (and I’ll never forget, or forgive the cynical and craven Rahm Emanuel for folding like a shanty house in a hurricane the second Scott Brown pulled off his big upset in Massachussetts). Finally, at almost the last possible second, Obama joined the fray, inspired more by the need for survival than anything else. But to his eternal credit, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. As we saw, the results were immediately apparent and quite positive.

Can we now, at long last, acknowledge what many of us suspected all along: the bill was never “wildly unpopular” with the general public. Or, to put a finer point on it, more than a little of that disenchantment was actually coming from Democrats who (correctly) felt the bill was not strong enough. But, as many of us suspected all along, when push came to shove of course they would endorse even a rather weak and watered down bill for two primary reasons. One, virtually any bill was better than the alternative the G.O.P. was offering, which was nothing (well, more tax cuts). And two, the Republicans absolutely meant it when they bragged that killing health reform would kill Obama’s presidency. In hindsight, if only a handful of Republicans had crossed the aisle, it’s likely the bill would have failed. By doubling down on the obstinance they have practically patented at this point the Republicans essentially dared the Democrats to pull together and see this through. Without that total, and arrogant, defiance, I’m not at all certain the Dems, famous for their inability to do anything, would have gotten the ball across the goal line.

As always, the so-called Liberal Media was about as useless as usual (and their general incompetence increases in direct proportion to the overall degeneracy of our political discourse). Obsessed with the trivial horse-race aspects of who won the most recent news cycle, and handicapping the odds and chances of whether some bill (any bill) might pass, they did less than a little to help dispel the truly hysterical talking points and outright falsehoods the right wing noise machine was expelling into the air.

And here is what I said to a friend last week: “If/when this bill actually passes you are going to quickly see the shameless media transition from the Obama’s presidency is doomed! meme to the Obama back on track! and all of a sudden we would begin to once again hear the t-word (transformative) associated with his presidency. In fairness, both of those assumptions are more or less accurate: if the bill had failed, it would have emboldened the Republicans and further intimidated the feckless Democrats (and we likely would have seen increased –and detrimental– influence from that paper tiger Rahm Emanuel); on the other hand, with the bill passing, it allows Obama and his party to regain (and more importantly, articulate) the narrative. Both parties knew what was at stake, although it (typically) took the Dems about eight months too long to feel the necessary urgency. For this alone, the oft-ridiculed Harry Reid should get his moment in the sun and be properly lauded for hanging in there and doing a ton of heavy, often thankless lifting. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi has gone from being a controversial figure to an instant legend: she, like Obama, was overlooked and underestimated, and it came back to bite her opponents in a big way. And man must that bite sting.

Lo and behold, look what happened to those opinion polls, literally overnight. Kind of hard to say the “majority” of Americans hated this bill, huh? And more importantly, that was always a bogus formulation. It was pretty obvious to anyone not at a tea party or on the NRCC payroll that more than a little of that antipathy was coming from the left. These folks (quite understandably) believed the bill was not strong enough: they (we) knew that this same bill was arguably to the right of what Nixon advocated in the early ’70s (!) and it was certainly close, if not a tad milder than what Bob Dole endorsed less than two decades ago (!!). Regardless, we understood that when putsch came to shove, (something made infinitely easier courtesy of the Republicans’ very vocal and uninhibited declaration that their sole intention was to stand as one in obstruction to the bill, and Obama) many of them would unite in support of this initiative. And that’s pretty much what happened.

So what about the independent voters?

Well, this coveted and often capricious demographic generally makes or breaks a sitting president and his legislation. How bad will the mid-terms be for the Dems? I felt they never would have been nearly as bad as many were predicting last month (or last week for that matter); I feel the prospects are much better now. In part because today, as much as ever, perception is reality: Obama (and this bill) is a winner. Equally important, people do tend to appreciate a leader who can get things accomplished. That he hung in there and did something presidents have been attempting to achieve for almost a century is also a self-fulfilling historical narrative. Obama has injected life, meaning and import into his first term.

To the victor go the spoils, history is written by the winners, etc. But it’s more (and less) than that: just as the fairly hysterical media coverage post-Brown did not paint an accurate portrayal of what was really going on, or what was likely to happen, the surprise passage of HCR is not going to transform moderates into liberals. It doesn’t need to. Unless the bill begins rescinding peoples’ coverage because of pre-existing conditions or bankrupting families who can’t pay their bills (oh wait, that’s what is already happening), it stands to reason that HCR will never be more unpopular than it was last Saturday. After Sunday, the bill can only get more popular in direct proportion to the number of people who realize it’s not only not the end of the world, but actually a pretty swell thing. This transformation is already underway(not just the big shift in public opinion in recent polls); each day that goes by without any of the more outrageous Republican predictions coming true is another opportunity for T&R (Truth and Reality) to vanquish the hysteria.

There was a good reason Karl Rove lost his shit on Sunday while David Plouffe toyed with him (and showed, about ten years too late, the most effective way to defuse this braying rodeo clown). Rove knew what everyone else on his team was figuring out: they threw everything they had, and everything they could possibly fabricate, in the monomaniacal pursuit of defeating HCR. And they still lost. The reason they wanted to beat it so badly was not because The Party Of No has the best interests of anyone at heart; it’s because they knew this would be political gold for Obama, and Dems for decades. Think about it for a second: if they even half-believed a fraction of the dire repercussions they were robotically shrieking about, they would have happily gotten out of the way and let Obama have his way. Because, if it was going to be so awful, and it was so clearly against the will of most Americans, the Dems would pay a very dear price for their assumptions. Of course, what is becoming increasingly clear, from the stimulus to HCR, is that during one of the worst years Americans have endured since The Big D, Democrats have scrambled and strategized to make things better while The Party Of No has held their breath, sucked their thumbs and egged on the worst elements of the lunatic fringe that now bolsters their base.

It’s a loaded term, particularly in light of the very recent outbreaks of violence, threats and manufactured outrage, but a day of reckoning is imminent. And it’s not for the party being targeted by this illiterate mob of mouth-breathing imbeciles; it will be for the party that has cynically, and eagerly, stoked the flames of this tea party silliness. These idiots were useful for the farcical “town hall meetings” (speaking of manufactured outrage, and an unhealthy dose of straight-up racism), and to provide flesh to bolster the dubious proclamations about how unpopular health care reform was/is. Now that the battle is over, and now that so many of these “real Americans” have exposed themselves for who they really are, it’s going to be difficult for the G.O.P. to disown them at the very moment that their association may finally be unwelcome.

But, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do. It was truly disgusting to see the contemptible Eric Cantor go from expressing tepid disapproval at reports of violence and paranoid hostility to shifting the blame to Democrats. Look, one need only read this blog (filed under “Politics”) to see that I have few qualms calling out my own side for its inanity, incompetence and self-absorption whenever it’s warranted. But at this particular moment in time, there is no getting around the fact that one party alone is associated with this ugliness. That violence is being encouraged is a repugnant enough thing; that it’s underscored by explicit racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is another. That this racist, homophobic, nationalistic rhetoric is funneled out ’round the clock by a major propaganda machine disguised as a “news” network is yet another. That a major political party is applauding and abetting this sewage is still another. That it has been kicked up a notch by that party’s recent VP candidate finally begs the question: is there a bottom here? At what point does a semblance of shame or propriety or, when all else fails, the impetus for political survival override this insanity?

As always, only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s equal parts encouraging and appalling to see what’s left of the Republican Party doubling down on denial and the fake fury that is born out of fear. For the sake of all our moral and responsible citizens, let’s hope they continue racing furiously in the other direction while Democrats –and the future of progress they represent –leave them in this moribund fantasy land of their own making.

An ostensibly rhetorical question I read (and get asked) quite often these days is “Why bother?”

Why bother getting invested in politics?

Why bother reading all those papers and blogs and magazines?

Why bother wasting time since they are all the same?

Why bother voting?

Well, there are lots of good reasons, some of which are immediately evident to anyone who takes the time to be moderately informed and is aware of not-so-complicated concepts like cause and effect. That the policies of our former administration (and, more importantly, the power-to-the-powerful ideology that informs those policies) bankrupted our nation and –this is the toughest one to grasp– made us less safe is not a matter of opinion; it’s not debatable and there is no room for any possible nuance.

Also, there is only one type of Socialism being practiced in America today and it has been in effect for longer than one year. It’s Corporate Socialism. For evidence to support this claim, I submit every action taken by every Republican politician since 1980. Case closed, your honor.

To the haters, I certainly feel your pain, to a point. Yes, watching the Democrats try to govern is an often painful and occasionally pitiful spectacle (it’s amusing: Harry Reid is at once a man who should never, under any circumstances, have gotten involved in politics, yet he is, in the final analysis, the prototypical politician). Of course, in their defense, a reasonable person understands that actually attempting to govern is messy, difficult and frustrating. Particularly, as people like Andrew Sullivan regularly point out, our nation has become increasingly ignorant, self-absorbed and childish: we don’t want any government interference, we don’t want to pay taxes and we demand to see all of these pesky problems go away and take care of themselves (or even better, the stance of the Ayn Rand worshipping Libertarian-leaning bozos: just leave us alone and the world will govern itself, but if my house catches fire or a burglar breaks in or the roads need to be plowed or the country is attacked some non-tax funded enterprise better be at the ready to protect me!)

We have become a country of children who want to skip the main course and go directly to dessert, every meal, and then complain that we’ve gotten fat. And that in itself is a problem: that allows the Republicans to continue to frame the idea of shared accountability and responsibility as an inherently negative or intrusive notion. Let me be clear: that is, upon cursory inspection, a decidedly anti-American sentiment. The idea that paying taxes and supporting regulation of the food we eat and air we breathe is some type of burden implemented by a leering Big Brother is beyond moronic and borders on offensive. The idea that we can have no taxes, no regulation, no government involvement, unfunded wars and private interests in charge of everything  is exactly the intelligence-insulting ideology that landed us where we are now. And, for the last time, and as Thomas “What’s The Matter With Kansas” Frank elucidated, vigorously endorsing the notion that the wealthiest .01% of the population should not pay any taxes is going to put exactly zero cents in your pocket and create precisely zero jobs.

So, in sum, yes it is discomfiting to watch the Dems go about their business. But then you look across the aisle and see the obstreperous opposition digging in with monomaniacal zeal to do nothing (other than obstruct, oppose and stymie any effort made to get us out of this mess). You have to hand it to them, though, stoking the “Tea Party” frustration, which is largely a result of the situation their actions put this country in (and, based on the virtual absence of a single minority at a single one of these gatherings, a rather unhealthy dose of old-school bigtory). That, of course, is a topic I (and many, many others more insightful than myself) have adequately addressed. For now, the prevailing issue that has cleaved the country in half is the topic of health care. If any further evidence was required (!!) about what is at stake and what the consequences of doing something (Dems) versus doing nothing (GOP) are, take a look at the invaluable Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times.

But for anyone still on the fence, or who can claim, at this point, to be genuinely ambivalent and/or persuaded that both sides are mirror images of one another, I point you to yesterday’s spectacle at CPAC:

Easy to appreciate the racist overtones there, huh? The comical association of “The Left” with Woodstock hippies, blah blah blah. That, of course, is run of the mill, Lee Atwater hogwash. Been there done that. Nothing to see here. Et cetera.

But to really get a sense of the farcical alternate universe these clowns inhabit, consider the featured speakers:

First, the rock star reception given to proud torture advocate, war criminal and suddenly outspoken former VP Dick Cheney. That alone speaks volumes.

Second, the dark lord’s daughter, Liz, who is racing at warp speed to find a new low in the apparently bottomless pit of political mendacity, gleefully ignoring reality and, following her father’s lead, doing her darndest to distort and malign, had this jaw dropper: “There is no polite way to put this: Obama’s incompetence is getting people killed.” Indeed, if he’s not careful, he may have an attack like 9/11 happen on his watch. But what more do you expect, and how deliciously appropriate (but not ironic, because the oblivious press and hapless Democrats will be predictably unable to connect the dots here) is it that the same week the party who likes to claim sole propriety on keeping Americans safe (the worst domestic attack in our country’s history notwithstanding) is upping the irresponsible rhetoric, we see the walking punch line that is Bernie Kerik sent to the slammer. Keep in mind, this is the same imbecile that self-proclaimed tough guy Rudy G. (Mr. noun, verb, 9/11 himself) ardently endorsed as our next chief of Homeland Security. Folks, the mind boggles.

Finally, we have the current ringleader of the so-called insurgent Right: Marco Rubio, the man Dana Milbank –one of the rare reliable voices from that ever shrinking pool of talent at The Washington Post,– geniusly calls the “Anti-Crist” in a must read, throwing raw red meat at the pack of insatiable hyenas. In admirable brevity, Milbank itemizes Rubio’s (and the current GOP’s) vision for how to get out of the mess they created: double down.

Rubio’s agenda: across-the-board tax cuts, lower corporate tax rates, and abolishing taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and inheritance. Oh, and reducing the debt, too.

Denial of accountability? Check.

Denial of reality? Check.

Denial of actual measures required to help, and not hurt, Americans? Check.

This is why you have to choose sides. This is why you can ill afford (literally and figuratively) to let these cackling, wealthy and well-insured weasels lull you into a state of impotent rage or, worse, apathy. Because aside from the ceaseless corporate welfare they will fight for, their ultimate ambition is to render the actually literate and sentient amongst us fed up and indifferent. Without awareness, and with no resistance, they can more easily continue their unchecked assault on our collective well-being.

First, let’s try to get a handle on what constitutes the GOP braintrust as it’s currently constructed.

In short, it’s sort of like the Three Stooges. No really.

First, you have your commentators and pols who traffic in, and trumpet, a willful ignorance that they wear like a sort of imbecilic armor: the Becks, Palins and Dan Quayle/Scott Brown fake everymen: these are the Curlys in the equation.

Then there are the Larrys: the mostly quiet and uncharismatic foot soliders. This would include the behind-the-scenes operatives like Eric Odom, Allen Fuller, and the lucky ones who cannibalize or fellate their way up the food chain, like the supremely insufferable Ari Fleischer, who quickly –and quite profitably– went into business for himself after he escaped the semi-hot glare of what passes for the White House press corps.

And finally there are the Moes: these are the movers and shakers, the ones who actually break into triple digits on the IQ scale, but either through bitterness, backwards thinking or (most often) the irresistible impetus of the almight dollar, dedicate their intellects and energies to discredited, corrupt and usually evil ends. These are the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Roves and that special breed of insidous insect, the conservative editorialist. There are too many of those to count, and the majority of them are forgettable and feeble, but there are a relative handful that have enormous influence. The unholy trinity of this camp would have to consist of William Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer. Especially Krauthammer.

For Charles Krauthammer, there is no stance too reactionary, no debunked theory too embarrassing to evangelize, no course of action too repugnant to rally around. He is an immoral cretin of the lowest order. He is the kind of guy who wipes a shit-stained finger under his nose just so the smell will remind him to keep his misery and distrust on full operational levels. He, like Dick Cheney, is that rare and revolting human being you can actually imagine being dejected by another person’s good fortune. The type of guy who is suspicious of laughter or anything spontaneous. The kind of creep who, not to put to fine a point on it, one could easily imagine having a black, maggot-ridden sore where his heart should be.

Yeah, and the sun sets in the west and the moon turns the tides. What else is new, you ask?

Well, at times even the most despicable and shameless mouthpieces for evil nose-dive for the depths with such force and shamelessness that it warrants notice. This is one of those times.

Today, The Washington Post, that bastion of neo-con accomodation, uh, I mean liberal media stalwart, provides him –courtesy of his role as regular contributor– the opportunity to take stock of the worst recession since the 1930′s, the worst jobs crisis in memory and a media circus cesspool that masquerades as contemporary political discourse on topics ranging from terror attacks to health care and dedicates an entire column railing about…the space program.

No I’m not making a joke or quoting The Onion. Check out the nauseating spectacle here.

Here’s a quick taste for those too smart, or constitionally ill-equipped to swallow this swill in between meals:

First, there is this gem, which you may have to read at least twice to believe (I just took a third swipe at it and I’m not quite sure chutzpah of this magnitude is even legal):

Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It’s like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

Yeah I know Charles, because our military spending has not continued to escalate (one is tempted to say skyrocket) each successive year, like fucking clockwork (a clockwork orange, that is). Even after the end of the cold war (and the subsequent despair Krauthammer clearly has never recovered from, at least until 9/11 gave him and his armchair general brethren new lease on life) and “old-school” military engagement, when the concept of actually fighting wars with big, bad aerial bombers seems increasingly archaic. Like something from those (bad) black and white movies that remain the only things able to give you a boner these days. As if the military budget did not increase during Obama’s first year. Not that you’d know this by listening to certifiable mouth-breathers like Kristol, Will and Krauthammer, but it’s the cold, plain truth. You can look it up here (Hat-tip to the ever reliable and ceaselessly sane Glenn Greenwald).

But then there is this which I can only admire. Having balls this big should render one unable to wear pants:

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private compaines to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Is this man for real?

Let’s examine the evidence: Krauthammer will go to the mattresses decrying all-things government (except, of course, military expenditures) but suddenly, launching metal machines into space (for what? for whom?) is not only imperative, but cannot possibly be funded by private companies. YOU MEAN THE SAME PRIVATE SECTOR THAT WALKS ON WATER, WARRANTS NO TAX INCREASES EVER REGARDLESS OF PROFIT, AND CREATES JOBS AND PROVES HOW RECKLESS AND INEFFICIENT AND DOWNRIGHT IRRESPONSIBLE A BLOATED GOVERNMENT IS? No, suddenly this is the one activity so sacrosanct and vital to the national interest that it absolutely obliges government backing.

Translation: Go back to sleep America. Nevermind what I’ve been babbling about for decades, this is not an instance of frivolous government waste that helps bankrupt the country and does no discernible good for hardworking Americans. This is not something we could possibly put off until a time when we are out of the reckless debt the polices Krauthammer did –and still does– espouse; this is not something that would actually slash costs, democratize the dissemination of actual goods and services and enable tax-paying citizens to retain a semblance of security and tangible equity for those tax dollars. In other words, this is nothing at all like health care. No, not at all. And not to worry: we can rest assured that the matter of insuring and protecting the same citizens who pay into the system will be a fight Krauthammer will keep stoking until he finally draws his last rattling and labored breath.

What a degenerate swine. What an immoral cretin.

Sarah Palin has officially out-cliched cliche. You can no longer even use the lazy –if entirely accurate and appropriate– depictions like “jumped the shark” or “stranger than fiction” or “a new low” because her capacity for shamelessness and self-aggrandizement is literally limitless. There is, as she displayed once again this weekend, no bottom to where she will wallow in order to score cheap (and untrue) political points, all while ducking any questions of any kind from anyone besides Fox “News”, and eagerly stoking the ignorant, bigoted sentiments of her knuckle-dragging demographic.

But you have to hand it to her. No, really. Can you, under any circumstances, imagine a time when you’d compare anybody to George W. Bush and catch yourself thinking a thought that began with the words “Well, at least he wasn’t…” Wow. Does it get any better for Palin, who has yet to answer a real question from a real reporter (and no, Katie Couric does not count, and even in front of that lightweight with those softball questions –what fucking newspapers do you read?– she made an ass of herself) continuing to mock Obama for, among other things, using a teleprompter. You mean like the one you used for your own speeches? At least, so far as we know, when Obama doesn’t have his teleprompter handy, he doesn’t have to…um…write answers on his hand like a fifth grader during a math exam. Let me repeat: wow.

(Sidenote:

As anyone with a sliver of sociopolitical awarness can attest, many of these Tea Party puppets have genuine and understandable gripes. The dilemma, as anyone with a modicum of historical awareness (and proximity to reality) understands, it’s precisely the policies and obsessions of the GOP that took us from boom to bust in unprecedented and appalling haste. Less than a year ago, one of the only redeeming aftershocks of the Great Collapse was that, at long last, the “free market” farce of voodoo economics, which had reached its unfettered and full flowering during the Bush years had crashed and burned so spectacularly and unmistakably, at least, finally, we had black and white cause and effect for those misguided, irresponsible and demonstrably immoral policies. Ah, but how quickly those least-served by these policies forget! As usual, as ever, it was the taxpayers (!!) who got stuck with the tab, and now we are waist-deep in a massive recession and jobs crisis. Suddenly, fiscal restraint is the operative priority, and these same charlatans who borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow are decrying the same stimulus they initially supported (that same stimulus that may have kept unemployment from growing to 25% and causing a genuine Depression with a capital D). Rome is burning and the right-wing spin-pigs are not just fiddling, they are actively promoting disinformation and stoking the aforementioned fear and loathing. Not that the idiots foaming at the mouth at these tea parties understand the ways 2+2 =4, in part because they can’t count to four. The GOP, led by the Tea Party Queen who, displaying her ceaseless loyalty to the “real” Americans whose pain she is profiting from, only charged $100k to speak this weekend, scoffs at the blue sky and calls for rain. They tear up the old playbook and throw a Hail Mary into the wind, telling these easily-led assholes the policies extending their unemployment benefits are part of a big government takeover by the Socialist president. And it works. Put us in charge again so we can kill some more jobs and bankrupt the rest of your 401-k and after that, get busy privatizing social security. It’s real America, all right. Real dumb America.)

When it comes to the farce that is Sarah Palin, Andrew Sullivan has done virtually all the heavy lifting, since the MSM has predictably reacted in two ways to the Palin phenomenon: dismissed it altogether (which is irresponsible) or else treated it with the both-sides-of-the-story stenography which has increasingly become their most notable M.O.. I’ve long held the opinion that if/when Palin ever, however improbably (though at this point it seems a hell of a lot less improbable than it did one year ago when she uncermoniously quit her post in Alaska, a circumstance that would have absolutely anihilated all further chances for any other politician in the world) she manages to slime her way to the nomination in 2012, the media will finally, at long last, have no choice but to lift the rather large rock that conceals her sordid and embarrassing (even for a politician) personal life. The inconsistencies, the outright lies, and especially the myriad deficiencies that make her a non-starter as presidential material and a natural leader of the Tea Party mob of half-wits and bigots.

If you truly have no clue what I’m referring to, just visit Sully over at The Daily Dish and, if you have an hour or two, catch up on (some of) what you’ve been missing. One almost hopes Palin gets that far just so the rest of us have the opportunity, finally, to see her actually have to answer an unscripted question. Again, it is to the MSM’s eternal shame that they let this inarticulate piece of bacteria fester and mutate into the media monster she has become. It’s all in the name of ratings and (I reckon?) the ostensible aim of being impartial that they have so cynically stood by, not even bothering to pretend being journalists. But while I know enough to not casually brush off the possibility of her rise to real power, I also am relatively confident that, as happened (albeit way too late in the game) with McCain, the supine media finally takes off its blinders and, (gasp) inquires about the unavoidable gaps and distortions in the carefully crafted mythology.

Speaking of McCain, what a contemptible swine. Good grief, despite the fact that his whole maverick shtick was calculated, insincere and frivolous, there was at least some redeeming value in the man (above and beyond the fact that he courageously served his country, which is an inviolable subject that I’ve never heard a respectable person take issue with). Ever since he sold the ragged remnants of what was left of his old, arid soul to win the nomination in 2008, he has been on a warp speed mission to become the quintessential fake politician –and that is saying a lot considering the competition for that odious crown.

There he goes: the handful of things he actually accomplished, for the good, he’s happily disassociated himself from, in the name of (unlikely) political expediency. it will be fun watching him run for his life in the suddenly too-close-for-comfort race in Arizona (and talk about the chickenshits coming home to roost: he is being out-reactionaried by a genuinely revolting troglodyte). Despite the typical, and farcical shenanigans we have practically come to expect from our pols, the one thing no one could take away from McCain was his eloquence on the matter of torture, he having had some considerable experience on that front. It was genuinely pathetic to see the man, for nakedly obvious (and oblivious) political reasons, actually go all Orwell and doublespeak about the exact same methods that were used against him, claiming they were not, actually, torture (Note: he never was honest, if crazy, enough to say he himself was not tortured, but that the same practices, when used by the U.S.A., do not qualify. If that is not the literal definition of cowardice, I’m not sure what is.)

As if that were not lame enough, his attempt (clearly prompted by the aforementioned threat to what he considered was he emeritus status as senator of Arizona, which has obliged him to lean further rightward) to cling to the old party line on gays in the military, hanging by his shriveled, gnarled and splintering old fingernails to the ugly side of soon-to-be-history should be a case study for future politicians on how not to succeed. Here’s the thing: a remotely intelligent person watches this desperate spectacle and thinks “But how can he kid himself? Also, what about what he is doing to his legacy, how will history not expose his shamelessness?” And the answer, regrettably, is that for a man with no soul and interested solely in extending his ever-weakening, sluggish hold on some semblance of power, legacy and history are luxuries he can’t afford. He has no time for reflection because the shadow behind him keeps getting darker and larger, and he knows better than anyone it will be sooner than later that his craven, corrupted ass will be snuffed out.

And, lest we ever forget, McCain may ultimately be (if he is not already) best known for his most ignoble achievement, which was foisting this talking point with boobs on an unsuspecting country.

Question: How many GOP staffers are looking for new jobs after agreeing to let the cameras roll during Obama’s smackdown at the Republican Retreat Q&A today?

(Answer: hopefully, none; if by some miracle that embarrassment was deemed in any way a success by the simpletons running the show in the not-so-big GOP tent, we should look forward to many more of these, like twice a day if possible.)

First off, let’s pause and consider something: can you imagine, under any circumstances, not only Bush alone (ha) but even if he had, say, Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove with him, ever appearing before cameras to answer direct questions in an unequivocally partisan environment? Please. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not wishing he had; dude humiliated himself just reading off of cue cards (or having answers directly piped to him during debates). Can you fathom the further levels of disgrace he would have brought upon the nation while endeavoring, under the hot lights and flashing digi-cams, to address unscreened queries from a hostile crowd? Of course I kid myself: he probably would have repelled into the auditorium sporting a flight suit and right-wing radio/Fox News masters of unreality would have declared it a TKO.

The fact that Obama would do it is beyond impressive; the fact that he can do it (and win, convincingly) is remarkable, illustrative and should give Democrats hope. We did not elect an idiot; we did not elect an empty suit. To watch him, in real time, wrangling with them, and (a la the undramatic eviscerations of McCain in the debates) calmly, methodically defusing them, without raising his voice, breaking a sweat or personally attacking, is to remember why people were overcome with the H-word (Hope) a year or so ago. It is like Reagan with Carter’s intelligence. Or Clinton without the smarm. Only more so.

This addresses the one tactical error I’ve complained about since last spring (!): Obama needed to be doing exactly this, then. About health care, about jobs, about any and everything, since at least early summer. That he’s only doing it now, after extreme circumstances, is unfortunate –and he and the party have paid a considerable price for it. But better late than never. Literally. And hopefully the feckless, spineless and mostly useless Democratic senate can take notes and learn a lesson or two. Their inertia has been worse than unacceptable (it has not done nothing; it has enervated and resucitated the braindead and tone-deaf Republican party), but to be fair, Obama’s virtual disappearing act from the public stage has not helped matters. Obama’s performance today is hopefully the salt spray required to move those slugs out from under their stones. Speaking of stones, maybe more than a few of them can grow some.

More of this, much more of this needs to occur as often and visibly as possible, effective immediately. Unfortunately, I don’t suspect the Republicans will make the same mistake a second time. That is, being seen in real time on camera trying to engage with Obama, and being shown –in color and without spin– having their collective asses handed to them on intellectual, moral and factual grounds. It is exhilarating, if lamentably overdue. And it’s up to the people with the majority (the majority of votes, the majority of ideas, and the majority of consent) to at long last begin bringing the fight to the party whose only goal is to accomplish nothing.