Mitch McConnell-- Mistress Of Spin Inside The Beltway

America is clamoring for THIS again?

During the last election, the GOP fired up much of the electorate by persuading many voters-- through mindless repetition-- that Senator Barack Obama was the most liberal member of the Senate. Few people bothered to check the facts; if they heard it from Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Beck, Palin and the entire Republican noise machine enough-- and then heard it amplified by the brain-dead mainstream media-- well... "if there's smoke, there must be fire" is a tenet of Idiot America. It didn't matter that Obama's voting record was always way down at the bottom of the barrel, tucked in their among reactionaries like Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, Pryor, Baucus, and never anywhere near actual liberals like Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse, Bob Menéndez, Barbara Boxer or Frank Lautenberg. No, Obama wasn't voting with Russ Feingold or Bernie Sanders or Chris Dodd or even Hillary Clinton. He was voting with Ben Nelson, Tom Carper and Evan Bayh. Evan Bayh may be a liberal-- but only in an alternative universe where Mitch McConnell, Larry Craig and Lindsey Graham are straight men singing the praises of Christian family values as they scurry back and forth to the Senate floor from Washington's public toilets.

It didn't hurt Obama because, it turns out, voters wanted a progressive after 8 years of knee jerk reactionary rule by a claque of corporate-controlled Republican zombies and vampires. So now there is a lot of buyer's remorse when Obama turns out to be... well, exactly what Obama always was, a corporate-friendly moderate with very tepid, overly cautious solutions to problems that call for game-changing solutions. The advisers he close include Wall Street lackeys like Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers and, worst of all, Rahm Emanuel. Worst of all not just because Emanuel is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Street lackey, but also because he used P.R. as deftly as the Republicans do to give himself the aura of accomplishment and "competent can-do tough guy."

That aura is as in sync with reality as the one about Obama being the most liberal member of the Senate or the new absurdity being floated by Miss McConnell that the current administration is hard left. Hard left? Only in a world where Mark Foley (R-FL) is caught breaking into the boy pages' dormitory after midnight and the Republican congressional leadership promises to hush it up if he agrees to run for re-election and save them the cost of running a candidate in an open seat. That's a dangerous world, although one usually without consequences for any of the perps. John Boehner, you may have noticed, has since risen in the ranks to leader of his party's House caucus. But Inside the Beltway, it just takes some pricey P.R., skillful repetition, cooperative, go-along-to-get-along media hacks and shills, and voilà! Rahm Emanuel is competent and responsible for a Democratic congressional resurgence, and Obama's sickeningly moderate agenda is "hard left."

Roll Call's interview with Miss McC this week reads like the ultimate in well-greased flackery, spoon-fed to teabaggers, dittoheads and other denizens of Idiot America who can certainly believe anything if they believe that the Buy Bull proves men coexisted with dinosaurs-- further proven by the popular television docudrama The Flintstones. See? A page right out of historeeeee:

Democrats “fundamentally misread the mandate of 2008. I don’t think it had anything whatsoever to do with turning America into a Western European country. It was more, kind of fatigue with the previous administration,” McConnell argued during an interview this week in his Capitol office.

McConnell argued that as a result, a “sea change in the political environment” has occurred over the last year that has favored Republicans while causing increasing divisions within Democratic ranks.

“One thing I think is pretty safe to say is that there has been a sea change in the political environment and the confidence, if you will, of the majority that they are in sync with the American people,” McConnell said. “If you look at the political landscape from, say, November of ’08 and compare it to today, we were down 12 in the party generic ballot, and two weeks ago in Gallup we were up four.”

That shift has implications for the president’s agenda on Capitol Hill, McConnell argued, noting that electoral pressures and public interest in issues such as the health care reform bill are driving that change.

“That has an impact on what happens up here, because we don’t exist in splendid isolation here. We are constantly interacting with our constituents, looking at the published polls about how people feel about how we’re doing. ... That explains in my view the difficulty they’re having passing the health care bill. The anxiety is on their side, and the energy and the passion is on our side.”

McConnell argued that Democrats and the White House have, at least on the domestic policy front, pursued an explicitly partisan approach. “The domestic strategy was, unify the Democrats, try to pick off a few Republicans, give it a patina of bipartisanship and jam them. ... I think the bipartisan stuff with them is just talk,” McConnell said.

Well, there you go. Why doesn't Obama just hand the keys to the White House over to Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann right now and announce that Harry Reid is stepping aside as Senate leader for a consensus candidate who bridges the gap between the two parties... Joe Lieberman?