Republicans Go All Out To Wreck Americans' Good Will Towards Obama With Another Smear Campaign

An inflammatory screed by the extreme right Wall Street Journal editorial board warned yesterday that Obama killed "any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington" on April 21-- "mark down the date," they insist rather dramatically-- when he "injected a poison into our politics" by not stopping an investigation into war crimes and torture by the higher-ups of the Bush Regime. Dan Balz and Perry Bacon examined the problem more dispassionately in the Washington Post.

Obama injected poison? Where have these guys been-- with their heads up their asses? The entire obstructionist GOP has mounted a major coordinated campaign against Obama on every front. They have a putz like Paul Ryan (R-WI) out on TV whining that Obama isn't being bipartisan enough while Long Island Congressman Peter King threatening to shut down the Congress and "go to war" if the Justice Department finds any lawbreakers in the Bush Regime committed crimes that have to be prosecuted and the clownish Michael Steele is castigated by the radical right members of the RNC for not calling Obama inflammatory names often enough! And what about the Missouri's pathetic old Kit Bond dragging himself out in front of the TV cameras to let the whole country know that though he's retiring he has no intention of going out with an ounce of grace and he's certainly not done spreading his toxins. His reason for running to the media with the Limbaugh/Gingrich/Cheney talking points: "Our terror fighters need to know whether their president has their back or will stab them in the back." What a shitead! He claims Obama released the torture memos as a partisan stunt. Watch the video of the moribund and morally bankrupt Bond on MSNBC. This from the party that has decided its future rests with branding Obama and the Democrats as "socialists." An e-mail from one of the clowns to all 168 voting members of the RNC accused Obama of restructuring the country along socialist ideals:

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

They even had the gall to wheel out the disgraced old hack Porter Goss who Bush was forced to fire as CIA director after just a few months when he was implicated in a series of corruption scandals mixing bribery, prostitutes, domestic politics, lobbyists, sleazy Republican politicians like Duke Cunningham. Goss, who's been keeping on the down low and hoping everyone would forget what a failure he was, jumped oon board the Limbaugh-Cheney crazy train yesterday, insisting Obama was "crossing a red line." (Legitimate intelligence officials contradict Goss' and Cheney's partisan ravings and "the CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any 'specific imminent attacks,' according to recently declassified Justice Department memos." And then there's Philip Zelikow, the former State Department counselor whose efforts, in writing, to warn the Bush Regime that their torture activities could land them all in prison were met by attempts to have all his reports confiscated and destroyed.)

And you might not be surprise by Juan's rant on torture, but what about Meghan McCain's explosion yesterday? She was bemoaning the fact that Cheney and Rove are still trying to be seen as the face of the Republican Party. She's creeped out by their very unpatriotic and endlessly repeated attacks on Obama and said it is "very unprecedented for someone like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to be criticizing the President." Her advice to them: "Go away."

The results of new polling from the very anti-Obama Associated Press and from Pew show the desperate political hacks who would rather see our country fail than watch Obama succeed have a long road ahead of them if they think they're going to bring the country over to the Dark Side with them. "When Americans are asked to assess television news coverage of Barack Obama, Fox News Channel stands out from other networks for being too critical of the president." Americans like and trust the president and they dislike the harsh, negative rhetoric from Fox and the Republicans.

Instead of paying any heed to the plotting and conniving sore losers and lockstep obstructionists, listen to what an actual distinguished ex-CIA agent has to say about this whole shit-storm the Republicans are raising:




ONE SMALL WORRIED FOOTNOTE FROM KEN

I say, hear, hear! Thank goodness somebody said it!

I just have this one small, or maybe not so small, lingering reservation, or maybe worry, carried over from the presidential campaign: When an entire political movement/party (whatever you want to call what's left of the hybrid of Modern Republicanism and Movement Conservatism) goes over to the dark side, rejecting any obligation to reality or truth and instead unleashing -- in massed chorus, at top hysterical volume, with endless repetition and without interruption -- a barrage of nothing but lies and insanity, to which, as I've tried to point out a couple of times, THERE IS NO POSSIBLE RATIONAL RESPONSE (you simply can't counter insanity with sanity, and webs of outright lies similarly take on a life of their own, beyond the reach of any possible correction), a certain portion of it sticks in the minds of the public.

I can't give you numbers for how large a portion of the public is affected, though again I worry that it's much larger than anyone has reckoned. And the practical result is that that portion of the public remains, at least for the time being, outside the reach of reason, not to mention facts. (Remember facts?) At the same time, while the Movement Goopers may finally be paying some price for their nihilistic-obstructionist tactics, it's still nowhere near enough, to the point where I might say they're still getting away almost scot-free.

Didn't somebody say that nobody ever lost by underestimating the intelligence of the American public? I just worry.

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