Oh no, make it stop! The 2012 campaign is under way!

Yes, it's 2008 GOP presidential hopeful-turned-2012 presidential hopeful "Minister Mike" Huckabee, trying his darnedest to figure out whether he's for or against cap-and-trade. Let's see, if it's a day with the letter "d" in it . . .

by Ken

Let's not misunderestimate, as Republicans like to say, how grim these next two years are going to be, with both Republicans and right-wing "centrist" Dems running as hard right in the face of the perceived national mood as their stumpy little legs will take them. We need to remember that President Obama isn't just a born capitulator when it comes to negotitation, although all the available evidence indicates that he is. A good portion of what he's "capitulating" to is stuff that in his heart of hearts he wants to see done anyway. He's just willing to carry it however much farther he has to in the face of those howling Teabaggers and other right-wingers he can feel gaining on him.

So with people like "Sunny John" Boehner and Eric "A Disgrace to the Jews" Cantor and Darrell "OK, I'm a Crook, but What of It?" Issa and a bunch of other committee-chairng hooligans occupying positions of actual governmental power, thereby amplifying their already wildly disproportional access to the infotainment noozemedia, not to mention Senate Minority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell commanding every obstructlier troops of obstruction, and an economy still in hell and a war with no end in sight, and so on and so on, it's not going to be pretty. Still, there are already indications aplenty that the New Order isn't going to be the ideological juggernaut it was cracked up to be -- mostly by those very same infotainment noozemedia, come to think of it.

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has (I dare say) some fun with the already-evident fractures in his column today, "Why so frightened, GOP?"

[D]uring the lame-duck session, it seemed to dawn on GOP leaders that they begin the new Congress burdened with great expectations -- but lacking commensurate power. It's going to be a challenge for Republicans just to maintain party unity, much less to enact the kind of conservative agenda they promised to their enthusiastic, impatient voters.

Robinson points to the possibility of increased defections from the formerly lockstep Senate GOP minority -- "there could be as many as 11 Republicans who might defect and vote with the Democrats, depending on the issue." He concludes: "The new Senate will be considerably more Republican than the old Senate, but whether it's more conservative remains to be seen."

Whereas the very fact that "the new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House" may actually be "the problem." Can Speaker-apparent Boehner really handle his new Teabagging cohorts?

Republicans face what, for them, is an unpleasant but inescapable reality. Ideologically, most Americans describe themselves as moderate or conservative; but when it comes to getting assistance from the government, most Americans are moderate or liberal. Look at health care, the issue that won the election for the GOP. According to polls, voters clearly favor the benefits that Obama's reforms will provide. All they really oppose is the insurance mandate that makes those benefits possible.

The idea of small, limited government may be appealing, but this is a big, complicated country. As some Republicans already know, and others soon will learn.

MEANWHILE THE PUTATIVE GOP PRESIDENTIAL
CAMPAIGNS HIT SOME ROUGH PATCHES OF ROAD

As a report by the AP's Charles Babington is headlined in today's Post: "GOP hopefuls find some issues a hazard early on." So we've got:

* South Dakota Sen. John Thune (you mean to tell me this doodybag is a 2012 GOP presidential hopeful?!) has been caught making a precipitously quick conversion from compulsive earmarker to a scourge of earmarks -- er, "explaining" that "I support those projects, but I don't support this bill, nor do I support the process by which this bill was put together."

* Our old pal Willard Romney is caught joining in the right-wing jihad against the Obama health care package and its infamous "individual mandate" when that mandate is essentially identical to the one he incorporated into the health care reform he oversaw as governor of Massachusetts.

* Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been caught telling whoppers about labor unions, which he could only back up with reference to a passel of lies upchucked by Veronique de Rugy a "senior research fellow" at George Mason University (which, it shouldn't be forgotten, has been permanently tainted by gobbling up those Koch Brothers millions; to quote the title of a post I wrote in October, "It's important that everyone associated with George Mason U. suffer the stigma of the Koch Bros.' Mercatus Center") on, as I live and breathe, Andrew Breitbart's website! Is there anyone in that chain of stupidities with a brain capable of even recognizing truth?

* Former Arkansas Gov. "Minister Mike" Huckabee, who this month claimed, with regard to cap-and-trade: "I never did support and never would support it, period," the only small, itty-bitty problem is that --

at an October 2007 meeting of the Global Warming and Energy Solutions Conference in New Hampshire, Huckabee said: "I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions. And I was disappointed that the Senate rejected a carbon-counting system to measure the sources of emissions, because that would have been the first and the most important step toward implementing true cap and trade."

In his post-facto weaseling he managed to drag the Chinese into his own poor-quality lying: Voluntary cap-and-trade, it appears, is OK, "but I was clear that we could not force U.S. businesses to do what their Chinese counterparts refused to."

* That sad hack Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour of course had his seemingly inevitable momentum toward 2012, er, sidetracked with his serially embarrassing blithering in defense of racial segregation.

Ha ha ha, see the bozos run. But that brings us to the true horror underlying all of these stories: Hide the children and the silverware, the 2012 campaign is upon us.

May God have mercy on our souls.

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