Right-wing doodyheads don't still dream that they have any clue about governing, do they?

"This is what Reaganites have always meant when they've talked of a 'shining city on a hill.' They envision a dystopia whose anti-tax fires incinerate social fabric faster than James Dobson can say 'family values' -- a place like Colorado Springs that is starting to reek of economic death."

-- David Sirota, in his syndicated column last week,

"The Case for Choosing Life"

by Ken

We get our share of right-wing trolls here, and lately there is a strain of gloating as the Obama administration flounders. Of course these people are so grossly stupid and dishonest that you almost have to marvel at the spectacle. While the assorted forces of the Do-Nothing Right have done nothing but marshall their obstructionist might to facilitate the decimation of the country, they cackle about Obama (still, of course, the imaginary Obama of their diseased imaginations) and "liberal" government, as if there was any connection between this determinedly "centrist" administration and liberalism. If modern Movement Conservatism hadn't rocketed the milestone markers way the hell out to the next galaxy, we could identify the Obama circle as "right of center," and congressional Democrats too, dragged into the other column by the power-deciding contingent of just-plain-right-wing Dems.

But the real piquancy of the spectacle is being lectured to on governance by people whose brains, even if they were all mooshed together (which they pretty much are, thanks to decades of careful cultivation and manipulation by shrewd, well-financed demagogues, and kept in a steady state of emulsion by the indefatigable blasting of the Right-Wing Noise Machine), probably couldn't come up with a workable idea for productive government, even in the tiniest measure, if their sorry lives depended on it.

These are, remember, the people who stood on the sidelines of the 24/7 horrors of the Bush regime, not just cheering, but ritually berating and even threatening anyone who had the simple sense to point out that the mayhem being perpetrated by the regimistas wasn't good for anyone except the economic predators who had put the regime in power. And when it finally became hard for even the dimmest bulbs to ignore the fact that the regime had been an unmitigated catastrophe in every dimension, the non-brain-using righties performed one of the great vanishing acts in human history: They disappeared even as much as the name of George W. Bush from their make-believe "reality" -- and proceeded to nominate for the presidency a shell of a man who even before the onset of senility had made a political career of hoodwinking the media into parroting a wildly false "moderate" image.

Then when they couldn't pull off an election miracle with the most dishonest political campaign in human history, in which every word out of the mouth of every Republican was an undisguised lie (except among the growing chorus of unapologetic thugs who felt no need to disguise their agenda of screeching ignorance and venomous hate), they formed an opposition that, ignoring repeated invitations to participate in the governing process, had a better idea: Scream "no" to everything, and stand impassably in the path of every effort to deal with the accumulated catastrophes bequeathed by our most recent experiment in right-wing misgovernance.

If ever a time called for liberal govenance, and an actual leader who would have cracked heads in Congress to enact a liberal agenda, this was it. And if ever there was a time for the doodyheads whose craven imbecility got us into this fix to shut their lying yaps, this was it.

Instead we got Democrats playing patsy for the rampaging doodyheads, and the doodyheads presuming to pollute the public discourse with even more clueless nonsense than before. Of course now the doodyheads are playing from their only position of real political strength: out of power, when they don't have to take responsibility for coping with the problems they've caused, and can just denounce everyone trying to do so.

True, there are a lot of Republican governors, and like their Democratic counterparts they're stuck having to grapple with real reality: managing to continue providing the government services that citizens expect (moronic right-wing rhetoric to the contrary) in the wake of the economic meltdown.

In his syndicated column last week, our friend David Sirota looked, from a Coloradan's vantage point, at real-world examples of both the right-wing dead end and a possible real-world way out. "Plagued by deficits, communities everywhere must now decide between tax reform and public spending cuts," he wrote, "between economic life and death. And thanks to two Western bellwether states, we know what each choice means."

As his example of "choosing death," he cited an example of right-wing ideology carried to its logical extreme: blood-red Colorado Springs:

Choosing death means mimicking Colorado Springs -- a Republican red tattoo on Colorado's purple heart.

As a venue for political experiments, the sprawly GOP enclave is as pristine a conservative laboratory as you'll find in America. If the city has garnered contemporary notoriety at all, it has achieved infamy for domiciling right-wing groups like Focus on the Family and infecting the world with viruses like Douglas Bruce -- the father of draconian initiatives that seek to prohibit governments from raising levies.

When the Tea Party movement’s anti-tax activists refer to the abstract concept of conservative purity, we can turn to a microcosm like The Springs (as we Coloradoans call it) for a good example of what such purity looks like in practice -- and the view isn't pretty.

Thanks to the city's rejection of tax increases -- and, thus, depleted municipal revenues -- The Denver Post reports that "more than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark; the city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops; water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead ... recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools (and) museums will close for good; Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends; (and) the city won't pay for any street paving."

Meanwhile, even with the Colorado Springs Gazette uncovering tent ghettos of newly homeless residents, the city's social services are being reduced -- all as fat cats aim to punish what remains of a middle class. As just one example, rather than initiating a tax discussion, the CEO of The Springs' most lavish luxury hotel is pushing city leaders to cut public employee salaries to the $24,000-a-year level he pays his own workforce -- a level approaching Colorado's official poverty line for a family of four.

This is what Reaganites have always meant when they've talked of a "shining city on a hill." They envision a dystopia whose anti-tax fires incinerate social fabric faster than James Dobson can say "family values" -- a place like Colorado Springs that is starting to reek of economic death.

Of course it's always easier to show what's wrong. Here's David's example of "choosing life":

Choosing life, by contrast, means doing what Colorado's governor and state legislature are doing by temporarily suspending corporate tax exemptions and raising revenue for job-sustaining schools and infrastructure. Even more dramatically, it means doing what voters in Oregon did last week.

As deficits threatened their education and public health systems, Oregonians confronted two ballot initiatives -- one modestly raising taxes on annual income above $250,000, another hiking the state's $10 minimum corporate income tax.

Despite these measures exempting 97 percent of taxpayers, conservatives waged a vicious opposition campaign, trotting out billionaire Nike CEO Phil Knight as their celebrity spokesperson. But this time, the right's greed-is-good mantra failed. In a swing state that had killed every similar initiative since the 1930s, voters backed the tax increases -- and chose economic life.

No matter where we live, this same choice will soon face us all in some form. It is a choice embodied in President Obama's pragmatic initiative to end his predecessor's high-income tax breaks, a choice for which future local and federal elections will serve as proxies.

Inevitably, anti-tax zealots will attempt to obscure what this choice is about -- but the choice is now crystal clear.

Tax reform or draconian cuts, life or death -- the decision is ours.

As David notes, the delusion of a free-market utopia isn't new. At the federal level, it dates back to the Age of Reagan. But of course the right-wing economic masters who pull the strings on Movement Conservatism have no interest in a free market, even if such a thing were possible in the real world.

I think it's worth remembering that probably the deepest-rooted, if least-talked-about, reason for the invasion of Iraq, the one that none of its proponents dared to speak of publicly, was the neoconservative fantasy of transforming the country into a "free market" paradise, feeding on (not to mention siphoning off) all that oil wealth.

Well, they did manage to embed enough "free marketeers" in the occupation to steal who-knows-how-many billions of dollars, and they created an occupation apparatus (I hesitate to call it a "structure," which would suggest that it was built with a set of objectives to accomplish) that paid hefty dividends to the corporate predators and American terrorists who had bankrolled the Bush regime. There's not much trace of paradise in Iraq, though, free-market-style or otherwise. And there's a lot of death and destruction lying in the path of the neocons' wet dream.

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