Thanks to the soft-on-dummies Obama campaign, right-wingers can repackage their disastrous failed policies as "common-sense wisdom"

by Ken

Confession time: I'm the one who added the clip of Rush Limbaugh talking to Sarah Palin to yesterday's Day 2 installment of Noah's Scorn Awards (The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Edition), and I'm still feeling slimy. As the caption noted, it's 10 minutes of listening to these tireless worshippers of ignorance and hate yammer about "commonsense solutions" to our economic woes. Actually, I suspect that Princess Sarah initially misspoke her mantra, which turns out to be "commonsense conservative solutions." You know, the tried-and-true things that history has shown work! Um, er, tax cuts. Yes, that's it, tax cuts!

[Expletives deleted. Many, many expletives.]

Shouldn't these blithering fools at least wait until the economy has been put together again before they set about crashing it again? Is it really possible that they don't understand that it was the doctrinaire conservative insanity of their saints from Ronnie through Chimpy that got us into this mess? Oh, they had help along the way from "centrist" bubble-blowers like Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin (whose cronies and disciples are now the Obama Economic Brain Trust), but it wasn't brain surgery identifying the chief culprits.

"Is it possible that they don't understand?" What am I thinking? Is there anything that they do understand? I mean, apart from how to manipulate sadly gullible people to further their own agendas.

A HISTORIC POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY SQUANDERED

How is it possible that the whole litany of wacko economic bullshit that proved itself wrong to the point of catastrophe has survived to obfuscate and, potentially, enslave another day? It's easy, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama blew it. They were so persuaded by their wretched advisers -- truly the scum of the earth -- that they needed to be blander than bland, and run as "centrists" (meaning right-wingers only defanged versions of the psychotics who have taken over the Republican Party and the whole discredited Conservative Movement).

In the process they lost the opportunity to run hard against, not just George W. Bush, but the politics of death-and-destruction his regime inflicted on a helpless country for eight years. Every word out of those people's mouths was a calculated lie; every policy they promulgated, to the cheers of their de-brained right-wing worshippers, was garbage. Even before they collapsed the economy, there was an election's worth of teaching opportunity, a chance once and for all to show the American people how they had been lied to and deluded.

But none of the major candidates bit. That would have been both hard -- requiring a serious political conversation -- and really risky. So instead we got just vague alllusions to a possibly less-than-ideal recent past. Candidate Obama kept promising us "change," but he never bothered to articulate what we needed change from and why we needed it -- supposedly because that would have been "negative," and centrist American didn't want to hear negative campaigning. Of course that didn't stop the McCranky people from poisoning the political atmosphere with unremitting lies and slime.

By the time the election season was in full swing, the failures of the Bush regime, in domestic and foreign policy equally, had become so glaring and so deadly that all those onetime Bush worshippers, the people who for seven years screeched "Bush-bashing" anytime anyone tried to point out the simplest realities about those monstrous frauds, seemed to have forgotten that there ever was such a person. Even while Chimpy was still squatting in the White House, with all the powers of the presidency, the people who through two presidential terms had regarded him as the messiah even forgot, or denied, his name.

It wouldn't have been a matter of kicking him when he was down; it would have been a matter of making people see that running the country for the benefit of the people who bought and paid for his regime was politially and economically disastrous, that the new American imperial policy had not only been a disaster but had even broken our armed forces for use when they might genuinely be needed. The models developed by all of those lamebrains in neoliberal, neoconservative, and just plain right-wing think tanks were all wacko bullshit. Those crackpots thought they could create a "free market" utopia in Iraq; all they could do was destroy everything they touched, and put our own country through protracted agony. And none of this was helped by the generous helping of extreme-right-wing (especially Christian Right) social policy Chimpy unleashed on the rest of us to buy the loyalties of those increasingly out-of-control powermongers.

But the mainstream Democratic presidential candidates stuck to the handlers' lame scripts, and never laid a hand on the underlying failures of Reagan-Bush-Cheneyism. Of course President Obama in office has given us reason to wonder whether his reticence didn't have something to do with having less disagreement with Bush-Cheneyism than we assumed. An awful lot of the current administration seems to flow smoothly out of the Bush regime. So maybe in that sense there was no missed opportunity for the Obama campaign and future administration. But for the country, we lost the chance to discredit those disastrous ideas for at least a generation.

Instead, they're all back. We're once again hearing from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner about his famous "radical centrism" -- though this raises the question, if the Obama people don't even pay attention to someone as commitedly centrist as Senator Mark, whom do they take seriously?

And inevitably we have Druggie Rush and Princess Sarah fobbing off their "commonsense conservative" solutions. Don't kid yourself: Americans are prepared to swallow it all again.

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