Last night on American Idol, Simon and company used the newly instituted "judges save" to rescue piano man Matt from the oblivion voters had consigned him to.
John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the rest of what passes for leadership in the Republican Party these days must be wishing there was a political equivalent.
Those pathetic, corporate lobbyist-backed tea parties clearly didn't do the trick. They were steeped in desperation. A bitter brew of misguided outrage and good-old-fashioned hate mongering.
It's what people do when the only two ideas they have -- tax cuts and deregulation -- have been given full expression for the last 8 years and failed. Miserably.
The GOP is so devoid of any actual solutions to the many crises we are facing they find themselves grasping at the vaguest hint of a talking point or, failing that, making stuff up out of thin air. So we get Rep. Spencer Bachus saying there are 17 socialists in Congress, and Michele Bachmann warning about "re-education camps for young people," and a Fox reporter "covering" a tea party saying we need to "wake up and start fighting the fascism permeating this country."
And we get Republicans frantically and feebly trying to turn a routine Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremists into some kind of Obama-led conspiracy against "ordinary, everyday conservatives."
Boehner, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and all the others cynically trying to exploit the report know full well that it isn't a "hit job" on conservatives but rather part of an ongoing series of threat assessments that has included editions on "Left-Wing Extremism: The Current Threat" (April 2001) and "Leftwing Extremists Likely to Increase Use of Cyber Attacks over the Coming Decade" (January 2009).
But they need something to agitate over, so we get nonsense like Malkin calling the report "a sweeping indictment of conservatives." It was exceedingly strange how quickly mainstream conservatives were willing to lump themselves in with the white supremacists and anti-government armed militias that are the real subjects of the DHS report.
When the desperation ploy of claiming that Obama is targeting conservatives failed to get any traction outside the right-wing echo chamber, the increasingly unhinged GOP messaging machine switched to Phase Two: trying to turn a potion of the report warning that "rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge" into proof that Obama is "targeting veterans."
"To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable," fumed Boehner.
Claiming that warning about extremists targeting vets is the same as targeting vets is like claiming that the police are "targeting children" when they warn parents to be on the lookout for pedophiles.
The truth is, when it comes to "targeting veterans," Obama has targeted helping make life better for them -- as opposed to perpetuating the lip service paid to our returning soldiers for the last 8 years. George Bush loved to praise our vets' sacrifice and service, then gave us a system that produced the Walter Reed scandal. As Paul Rieckhoff pointed out on HuffPost, Obama has already moved to fulfill two of his campaign promises to vets: push for advance funding of the VA, and for an overhaul of military and VA record keeping -- "removing two of the most significant bureaucratic hurdles that keep veterans from the healthcare and benefits they have earned."
But why let the facts get in the way of a ginned up controversy?
The Republican flamethrowers have proven very adept at being able to argue whatever side of an issue allows them the chance to slam Obama.
We saw this very clearly with the recent Somali pirate standoff. For days before the final rescue, Limbaugh had been accusing Obama of not taking the problem seriously enough, bellowing that "idiots like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think pirates and terrorists -- and this is terrorism -- are criminals, not enemies." Then, once Obama ordered the Navy to act, Limbaugh was suddenly outraged that he'd gone too far, lamenting what he described as "the killing of three black Muslim kids" who were "shot on the high seas at the order of President Obama."
It's amazing how quickly "terrorists" can become "three black Muslim kids" when there is political hay to be made.
Even Bernie Goldberg, who has accused the media of slobbering over Obama, took Sean Hannity to task the other night for "going out of [his] way to find fault with every single thing" Obama does. "If something bad happened here," Goldberg told Hannity, "and thank god it didn't, but if something bad happened here, I'll guarantee you, I'll tell you who would be leading the crusade against [Obama]: You."
Yesterday's tea parties featured a lot of misdirected rage. Blame the socialists! Blame the fascists! (Interestingly, to many protesters, "socialist" and "fascist" were interchangeable epithets. Have words lost all meaning? Perhaps a round of Remedial Poli Sci would help.) And, of course, there was a surfeit of Blame Obama -- even though he has cut taxes for just about everyone at the tea parties, except the anchors covering them for Fox (and even some of them might be getting a tax cut, depending on how much Roger Ailes is paying these days).
The one unmanufactured emotion behind the outrage was fear. And then, much beyond the tea parties -- and across the political spectrum -- there is real anger at what is seen as the unfairness of the way the bailouts are being handled.
While it's easy -- and totally called for -- to shake our heads at all the craziness that has consumed the Republican Party as of late, I think Democrats need to be careful not to turn their backs on what could become a dangerous conflagration: a grassroots populist backlash fueled by the perception -- one based on a lot of reality -- that the Obama economic team is treating Wall Street with kid gloves, and acting as if the interests of the big banks are aligned with the public interest, even though again and again we are presented with evidence of how much they diverge.
In the middle of all the manure the GOP is slinging around, this perception is the only thing Republicans might be able to turn into political gold in 2010 -- the only thing that could rescue them from the Road to Irrelevance they are racing down.
P.S. I was on Countdown last night discussing these themes with Keith. The video is embedded below.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Please join me on Facebook and Twitter.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
Bob Cesca: The "Obama Bear Market" and Other Tales of Cable News Insanity
When MSNBC airs a reoccurring story that coincides with Michelle Malkin's latest rant, then I think we can safely begin to question MSNBC's descent into crazy.
The culprit is "The Pledge." For years, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has been able to enforce a demand that Republican lawmakers take a solemn pledge not to raise taxes.
What this means is that all these lawmakers can do is propose tax cuts--to solve any and every problem-- even when the past 8 years shows that trickle-down economics and tax cuts for the rich lead to economic disaster.
Pledge-takers cannot support, even if the want to--needed projects such as high-speed rails or rebuilding American's crumbling bridges and tunnels and highways or health care reform if it means raising taxes.
What is the nation's main barrier to bi-partisan legislation? It's not Obama. It's The Pledge.
Pledge-takers need to know the words of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican ever, who said: "Bad promises are better broken than kept."
Will C. Justice
Try this for an explanation of why the crash occurred, and its from no friend of King George: http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879
Obama himself has said that the small businesses are the foundation of this country's economy, and I agree. Somehow he doesn't acknowledge that when you tax those above $250,000 annual income, you hit approximately 60% of small business owners.
Oh by the way, the tax that Obama approved on smoking is actually a gigantic increase in taxes on the working class, since they smoke at a much higher frequency rate than the upper classes. Remember the following:
"I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
Mr. Biden:
"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised ... whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax."
Sorry...Promise broken.
Tell me where I'm wrong or is just recylced political stuff.
Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824.
You can't expect Pepsi to say you should drink Coke. Politicians sell us ideas...then do what they want behind closed doors while they publicly debate the opposing side on these ideas they sold us....and both sides work together to make sure nothing gets done.
Of course the Repubs have no ideas....because the problem isn't real for them...what is real is the next election....and the economy for them is just fine!
I'm sure the economy is just fine for boths sides right now....
This is what our tax dollars are paying for.....and they have excellent healthcare plans...
I thought that was just business as usual for them.
Now, post-rape of the World Economy, it becomes virtually impossible for the Republican Party to distance themselves from a result that should have been seen as inevitable.
What the Conservative philosophy always fails to take into account is the unlimited capacity for greed in the human animal.
Until and unless the Republican Party acknowledges some role for government
in protecting the public good from the excesses of greed, they will always
be promoting an unrealistic ideal.
Instead of some basic reflection, they continue to promote simple answers and a faux homespun philosophy that falls apart in the real world.
They keep their followers ignorant and riled up on external issues, pack them with lies and carefully coordinated toy phrases, least they wake up
and see that they've been had.
To do otherwise is to lose the support of their two empowering segments;
The very rich who benefit from their programs, and the easily manipulated
who can be convinced to vote against their own best interests.
Their answer is that the problems were caused by the federal government forcing banks (i.e. too much regulation) to give mortgages to the poor who couldn't afford them and to minorities. Pat Buchanan tried to make the point again this week on The McLaughlin Group. Fortunately, he didn't get that talking point in unchallenged.
Private interests have lobbied for government protection for many years now. The economy is incredibly skewed because of price controls, wage controls, product controls etc. Did you choose to pay for a seatbelt in your car? Whens the last time you drank natural milk? Why can't Americans get real sugar in their colas instead of the deadly high fructose corn syrup?
Any talk of free markets of late have been mere lip service to lead the gullible into voting for one party or another. We have not had a free market in over one hundred years. Just expanding government.
Second government can not legislate values. Values come from individuals. There is nothing government can successfully do to eliminate greed (greeds been around longer than our government).
We must stop looking to government to give us handouts. Nothing is free in life and resources are finite. There is nothing essential about government. Our founding fathers understood this and we have forgotten it. Do not be mislead by politicians or their puppets.
A true free market is a beautiful thing. Go to mises.org to read about it and see that we haven't had a free market in over a hundred years. Only misleading lip service. All politicians do this, not just republicans.
I agree the republican party is a sham. In my opinion so are the democrats. Only libertarians have a solid foundation, Austrian economics, upon which to logically, morally, and sustainably, base policy decision.
I am sad to see this mess. We need more than one side to all issues. Republicans provide no useful input at all at this point. They are irrelevant now.
But they still make great sound bites, for the country to chew and spit out.
Yet, the far right of the GOP has itself up in arms over gun control. Idiots.
We need a new "conservative" party. It can use the same name, but we need a fresh start. I continue to support Obama, he is just plain right for the most part. I am not pleased with the way he is allowing the economy to go, it is not getting "fixed".
But still, G O who?
Yes, let the Rethugs die. They won't be missed.
I agree and predict that with the current GOP upheaval, the Blue dogs and other Dem factions will peal off to form the new political competition.
The win by Barack Obama has transformed political discourse and reshuffled the sides. How it shakes out remains to be seen, but it will surely be unrecognizable when things settle.
I for one am loving the new Kinder, Gentler America President Obama is protraying.
There's a lot to comment on, but I'm going to only do it on one subject. You claim that the libs want to help the returning vets. After all, you spent a lot of time bashing Bush and his lack of medical care for them, and it became one of your favorite weapons to use against him in the primaries.
Then explain to me why the libs tried to cut the medical aide for veterans all together. After Obama took oath, all of a sudden the libs wanted the veterans to find and finance their own health care insurance.
You liberals are so blinded by your stupidity and by the media's "messiah" image it has given to the new leader that's going to bring our economy to it's knees...intentionally. I thought I could handle coming here and seeing what you have to say, but you're intelligence is too low to tolerate.
Shinseki and Gates are also working on streamlining VA in order to do away with an 800.000 case backlog in VA, where veterans have to wait for years for a decision. Obama has already done more to improve veterans benefits than the previous administration had done in 8 years.
Fact is, John McCain voted against veterans in 2004, '05, '06 and '07, and Bush has an 8 years long history of dismembering veterans benefits. The only problem is that some people in the right spectrum are obviously too dumb to to read the paper, or pull up legislative bills on the Internet, and take everything that Rush blabs out for real.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/05/MNQLUQ4IS.DTL&hw=veterans+bush&sn=001&sc=1000
Why "rescue" the weepublican Party?? Why not just let it die on the vine -- or the gutter/ditch -- where it really deserves to lie?
Is it a secret, or something -- that the weepublican Party is nothing more than a political tool of Big Biz interests??? And Foxsnooze is its media mouthpiece -- ??????
The weepublican Party is like a street hooker -- pay it enuf money, and it'll be anything you want it to be: rock-solid evangelical fundamentalist, rabid anti-communist avenger!, staunch advocate of all things Americana (except the Constitution -- that's sooooo yesterday!!), macho-man GI-Joe worshipper (except when it comes to medical care, apparently) . . . you name it, they're it!!!!
The weepublicans think they can keep going to the Joseph Goebbels Memorial Propaganda Well indefinitely -- and it will work, every time . . . at least that's what Karl Rove is telling them -- the American people are stupid, and will believe whatever they're told . . . as long as you tell them over and over, what you want them to hear.
Right??